7  " 


BX  5131    .M38  1843 

Maurice,   Frederick  Denison, 

1805-1872  . 
The  kingdom  of  Christ 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2015 


https://archive.org/details/kingdomofchristoOOmaur_0 


THE 

KINGDOM  OF  CHRIST; 


OR   HINTS   RESPECTING  THE 


PRINCIPLES,  CONSTITUTION,  AND  ORDINANCES 

OF 

THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH. 


BY      ^  ♦ 

FREDERICK  DENISON  MAURICE,  M.  A. 

CHAPLAIN  OF  GUY'S  HOSPITAL,  AND  PROFESSOR  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 
AND  HISTORY  IN  ZINGS  COLLEGE,  LONDON. 


FROM  THE  SECOND  LONDON  EDITION, 


N  E  W-Y  O  R  K: 
D.  APPLETON  &  CO.,  200  BROADWAY. 

PHILADELPHIA : 
GEO.  S.  APPLETON,  148  CHESNUT-ST. 

MDCCC  XLIII. 


"  What  is  now  to  be  done  ?  Must  Truth  be  for  ever  in  the  dark,  and  the  world 
for  ever  be  divided,  and  societies  disturbed,  and  governments  weakened,  and  our  spirits 
debauched  with  error,  and  the  uncertain  opinions  and  the  pedantry  of  talking  men  ? 
Certainly  there  is  a  way  to  cure  all  this  evil,  and  the  wise  Governor  of  the  world 
hath  not  been  wanting  in  so  necessary  a  matter  as  to  lead  us  into  all  truth.  But 
the  way  hath  not  yet  been  hit  upon,  and  yet  I  have  told  you  all  the  ways  of  man, 
and  his  imaginations,  in  order  to  Truth  and  Peace  ;  and  you  see  these  will  not  do ; 
we  can  find  no  rest  for  the  soles  of  our  feet,  aaiidst  all  the  waters  of  contention 
and  disputations,  and  little  artifices  of  divided  schools  ....  We  have  exam- 
ined all  ways  but  one,  all  but  God's  way.  Let  us,  having  missed  all  the  others,  try 
this." — Bp.  Taylor,  Via  Intelligentia. 


TO  THE 

EEV.  DERWENT  COLERIDGE, 

STANLEY  GROVE,  CHELSEA. 


MY  DEAR  MR.  COLERIDGE, 

In  a  note  to  your  volume  on  the  Scriptural  character  of  the  Eng- 
lish Church,  you  have  alluded  to  the  first  edition  of  these  Hints. 
Your  object  was  to  correct  one  of  my  many  inaccuracies,  and  this 
service,  which  was  itself  a  very  kind  one,  you  made  more  accepta- 
ble, by  the  approbation  which  you  expressed  of  my  general  design. 
Under  any  circumstances  I  must  have  valued  such  a  recognition 
from  one  who  had  bestowed  so  much  serious  and  intelligent  consid- 
eration upon  the  subject  of  which  I  had  treated ;  I  was  still  more 
pleased  with  it,  because  there  were  qualities  in  your  work  which 
might  have  made  me  fear  that  you  would  be  less  tolerant  of  mine. 
Its  calm  scholar-like  tone  and  careful  English  style,  were  strikingly 
contrasted  with  the  crudeness  and  hastiness  which  were  visible  in 
every  part  of  my  Letters  to  a  Quaker.  Nevertheless,  I  found  with 
great  delight,  that  neither  you  nor  the  accomplished  Editor  of  Mr. 
Coleridge's  works,  had  been  hindered  by  these  defects  from  taking 
an  interest  in  my  thoughts,  or  from  recognising  in  them  one  among 
a  thousand  indications  of  the  influence  which  your  father's  writings 
are  exercising  over  the  mind  of  this  generation. 

Every  one  who  has  felt  this  influence  must,  I  think,  be  anxious 
to  acknowledge  it.  You  may  well  be  surprised  therefore,  that  in  a 
book  of  some  length  I  should  have  referred  to  it  so  seldom.  Twenty 
years  ago  you  might  have  attributed  such  an  omission  to  a  cowardly 
and  dishonourable  dread  of  being  associated  with  an  unpopular  name. 
But  at  the  time  I  wrote,  the  basest  man  could  not  have  been  affected 
by  such  a  motive  as  this,  for  the  different  English  parties  which, 
during  Mr.  Coleridge's  life-time,  had  only  differed  in  the  degrees  of 
their  dislike  to  him,  were  scrambling  for  a'  share  of  his  opinions.  It 
seemed  to  me  that  the  only  danger  of  another  reaction  lay  in  the 


6 


DEDICATION. 


ambition  of  his  admirers  to  make  him  responsible  for  their  statements 
of  his  views  or  their  inferences  from  them.  To  this  evil  I  wished 
not  to  be  accessory.  I  had  never  enjoyed  the  privilege  of  intercourse 
with  him.  I  had  no  means  therefore  of  correcting  the  impressions 
of  him  which  I  had  derived  from  his  works.  I  was  of  course  liable 
to  the  greatest  mistakes  of  judgment  in  my  interpretation  of  these, 
as  well  as  to  the  moral  temptation  of  perverting  them  to  my  own  pur- 
poses. I  thought  it  better  therefore,  to  seem  even  to  myself  ungrate- 
ful and  a  plagiarist,  than  to  incur  the  risk  of  abusing  his  name  to 
the  support  of  sentiments  which  he  might  have  disapproved,  and  per- 
haps, of  hindering  some  from  profiting  by  his  wisdom,  because  I  had 
taught  them  to  connect  it  with  my  follies. 

This  caution,  however,  was  of  little  avail.  The  only  two  reviews 
which,  so  far  as  I  know,  bestowed  any  attention  upon  my  book — 
the  one  treating  it  with  extreme  kindness,  the  other  with  unbounded 
contempt, — brought  my  name  into  flattering,  but  most  undeserved 
juxtaposition  with  Mr.  Coleridge's.  And  I  could  not  help  fancying 
that  one  of  these  critics  would  have  been  well  pleased  that  its  read- 
ers should  have  attributed  to  the  master,  the  monstrous  absurdity, 
self-sufficiency,  love  of  priestcraft,  hatred  of  the  rights  of  conscience, 
preference  of  Fathers  and  Councils  to  Scripture,  which  were  affirm- 
ed to  be  characteristic  of  the  disciple.  Every  person,  I  conceive, 
who  has  been  thus  spoken  of,  should  be  ready  to  explain,  as  well 
as  he  can,  how  far  the  charge  is  true,  that  he  has  derived  his  method 
of  thought  from  his  supposed  teacher,  and  if  it  be  true,  to  what  ex- 
tent that  teacher  is  answerable  for  his  application  of  the  method. 
Such  an  explanation  I  am  anxious  to  make  now  for  the  relief  of  my 
own  mind,  and  that  I  may  rescue  your  father's  memory  from  any  in- 
jury which  I  may  have  done  it.  I  might  have  addressed  my  confes- 
sion to  many  dear  friends  who  are  admirers  of  his  writings.  But  I 
would  rather  make  it  to  one  of  his  family,  first,  because  I  rejoice  to 
think  that  those  who  have  most  profited  by  what  he  has  taught  them, 
do  not  and  cannot  form  a  school,  and  because  it  is  most  desirable 
that  the  English  public,  with  its  party  notions  and  tendencies,  should 
not  suppose  that  they  form  one ;  and  secondly,  because  my  feeling 
towards  him,  though  as  I  have  said  not  founded  upon  any  personal 
acquaintance  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  word,  is  yet  so  strictly  and 
vividly  personal,  that  I  cannot  bear  to  think  of  him  chiefly  as  a  wri- 
ter of  books,  and  that  I  am  always  delighted  to  connect  him  with 
any  human  representative. 


DEDICATION. 


7 


There  are  persons  who  can  feel  no  affection  for  a  book  unless 
they  can  associate  it  with  a  living  man.  I  am  not  sure  whether  I 
labour  under  this  incapacity,  but  I  own  that  the  books  of  Mr.  Cole- 
ridge are  mainly  interesting  to  me  as  the  biography  of  one  who 
passed  through  the  struggles  of  the  age  to  which  we  are  succeeding, 
and  who  was  able,  after  great  effort  and  much  sorrow,  to  discover  a 
resting-place.  Those  juvenile  poems  which  exhibit  him  to  us,  when 
he  was  seeking  in  Unitarianism  a  refuge  from  the  flatness  and  the 
falsehood  of  a  mere  state  Christianity — the  fierce  and  magnificent 
ode  in  which  he  sees  the  old  European  world  of  convention  and  op- 
pression falling  to  pieces,  and  rejoices  in  the  sight — the  noble  recan- 
tation of  his  hopes  from  republican  ascendency — his  ode  to  Despon- 
dency, embodying  so  perfectly  the  feelings  of  a  man  who,  after  the 
disappointment  of  all  practical  hopes,  had  sought  in  meditation  for 
deliverance  and  rest,  and  then  on  returning  to  the  actual  world  had 
found  its  glor/  departed  and  his  capacities  of  enjoyment  dead — these 
poems  have  dways  seemed  to  me  so  intensely  and  painfully  real, 
and  so  expressive  of  what  thousands  of  minds  in  different  measures 
must  have  be3n  experiencing,  that  I  do  not  suppose  I  have  ever  done 
justice  to  any  of  them,  merely  as  a  work  of  art.  I  do  not  think 
there  is  anything  inconsistent  in  this  acknowledgment  with  the  be- 
lief, that  in  him  as  in  every  great  poet,  the  exercise  of  the  creative 
faculty  impied  self-forgetfulness,  and  the  power  of  passing  beyond 
the  region  of  personal  experience.  No  one  can  utter  the  thoughts 
of  other  men  as  well  as  his  own,  can  be  in  any  degree  the  spokes- 
man of  h:'s  time,  to  whom  this  quality  does  not  belong.  But  it  con- 
sists I  should  imagine,  nearly  always  with  much  of  inward  suffering. 
The  person  who  enters  most  into  what  a  number  of  others  are  expe- 
riercing,  does,  in  the  strictest  and  liveliest  sense,  experience  it  him- 
sell  On  these  points,  however,  I  have  no  right  to  speak,  and  if  I 
spak  ignorantly,  you  must  remember,  that  I  merely  pretend  to  tell 
yoi  what  my  own  impressions  have  been,  not  to  make  them  a  standard 
foiother  readers.  Your  father's  greater  poems,  such  as  the  Ancient 
Mriner,  and  Christabelle,  seem  undoubtedly  to  belong  to  the  region 
ofthe  pure  imagination.  But  I  question  whether  I  should  be  as 
men  interested  as  I  am  even  in  these,  if  I  did  not  discover  in  them 
mny  veins  and  fibres  which  seem  to  me  to  connect  them  with  his 
prsonal  being ;  if  they  did  not  help  me  to  read  more  clearly  the  his- 
try  of  his  mind,  and  therein  the  history  of  our  time. 

And  as  I  have  never  learnt  to  separate  his  poetical  genius  from 


8 


DEDICATION. 


himself,  so  I  fear  I  have  been  as  little  able  to  appreciate  him  formally 
and  abstractedly  in  the  character  of  a  philosopher.    In  his  "  Friend" 
I  seem  to  discover  the  very  same  man  whom  I  had  known  amidst 
the  storms  of  the  revolutionary  period.    Nor  do  I  find  him  less  im- 
patient of  mere  rules  and  decrees  than  he  was  then ;  only  the  impa- 
tience has  taken  a  new  form.    He  has  been  convinced  that  society 
is  a  reality,  that  it  would  not  become  at  all  more  real  by  being  unmade 
and  reconstructed,  and  therefore  he  has  begun  to  inquire  what  are 
the  grounds  of  its  reality,  and  how  we  may  be  preserved  from  mak- 
ing it  into  a  fiction  and  a  falsehood.    That  this  inquiry  is  complete 
and  satisfactory  I  do  not  affirm,  I  rejoice  to  think  that  it  is  not;  I 
believe,  if  it  had  been  more  complete,  it  would  not  be  half  so  profit- 
able as  it  has  been  and  is  likely  to  be  for  generations  to  come.  Its 
merit  is,  that  it  is  an  inquiry,  that  it  shows  us  what  we  have  to  seek 
for,  and  that  it  puts  us  into  the  way  of  seeking.    Hence  it  was  and 
is  particularly  offensive  to  more  than  one  class  of  persons.  The 
mere  Destructive  complains,  that  it  recognises  the  worth  of  that 
which  ought  to  be  swept  away.    The  mere  Conservative  is  indig- 
nant, because  it  will  not  assume  existing  rules  and  ophions  as  an 
ultimate  basis,  but  aims  at  discovering  their  meaning  and  their  foun- 
dation. The  man  of  Compromises  is  most  bitter,  because  it  assumes 
that  the  statesman  has  some  other  law  of  conduct  than  that  of  sail- 
ing with  the  wind.    The  mere  Englishman  is  angry  to  fird  the  com- 
mon topics  of  the  day,  taxes,  libels,  bombardments  of  Copenhagen, 
not  treated  of  as  they  are  treated  in  his  favourite  journals.  The  man 
of  Abstractions  cannot  understand  what  such  topics  have  to  do  with 
a  scientific  book.    This  combination  of  enemies,  with  the  adran- 
tage  which  each  derives  from  being  able  to  speak  of  the  book  as 
"  neither  one  thing  nor  the  other"  is  quite  sufficient  to  explain  |ny 
measure  of  unpopularity  which  it  may  have  met  with.    To  accomt 
for  the  power  which  it  has  exerted  in  spite  of  these  disadvantages — 
and  many  others  of  an  outward  kind  which  I  need  not  hint  atin 
writing  to  you — to  explain  how  a  book,  which  is  said  to  be  uttely 
unpractical,  has  wrought  a  change  in  men's  minds  upon  the  m<^t 
practical  subjects,  how  a  book,  which  is  said  to  have  no  sympatta 
with  the  moving  spirit  of  this  age,  should  have  affected  the  mat 
thoughtful  of  our  young  men ;  this  is  a  work  of  greater  difficult^ 
which  I  hope  that  some  of  our  Reviewers  will  one  day  undertake 
I  am  not  attempting  to  solve  any  such  problems,  but  am  merely  ao 
counting  for  its  influence  upon  my  own  mind,  an  influence  mainlj 


DEDICATION. 


9 


owing  to  those  very  peculiarities  which  seem  to  have  impaired  or 
destroyed  its  worth  in  the  opinions  of  wiser  people.  For  this,  at 
least,  I  am  thankful,  that  this  book,  so  far  from  diminishing  my  in- 
terest in  those  which  treat  of  the  same  subject,  or  tempting  me  to  set 
Mr.  Coleridge  up  as  the  one  teacher  upon  it,  has  enabled  me  to 
honour  others  of  the  most  different  kind,  belonging  to  our  own  and 
to  former  times,  which  I  otherwise  should  not  have  understood,  and 
might,  through  ignorance  and  self-conceit,  have  undervalued ;  above 
all,  to  reverence  the  facts  of  history,  and  to  believe  that  the  least 
perversion  of  them,  for  the  sake  of  getting  a  moral  from  them,  is  at 
once  a  folly  and  a  sin. 

And  it  seems  to  me  that  I  have  found  help  of  a  similar  kind  to 
this  in  a  different  department  of  thought  from  that  still  more  irregular 
work,  the  Biographia  Literaria.  If  a  young  man  in  this  age  is  much 
tormented  by  the  puzzles  of  society,  and  the  innumerable  systems  by 
which  men  have  sought  to  get  rid  of  them,  he  is  haunted  almost  as 
much  by  the  different  problems  of  Criticism,  by  a  sense  of  the  con- 
nexion between  his  own  life  and  the  books  which  he  reads,  by  theo- 
ries about  the  nature  and  meaning  of  this  connexion,  by  authoritative 
dogmas  respecting  the  worth  or  worthlessness  of  particular  poems  and 
paintings,  by  paradoxical  rebellions  against  these  dogmas,  by  ques- 
tions as  to  the  authority  of  antiquity  and  the  distinct  province  of  our 
time,  by  attempts  to  discover  some  permanent  laws  of  art,  by  indig- 
nant assertions  of  its  independence  upon  all  laws.    A  person  cannot 
have  observed  himself  or  his  contemporaries  with  any  attention,  nay, 
he  can  scarcely  read  over  the  rude  statement  of  these  difficulties 
which  I  have  just  made,  without  feeling  how  intricately  they  are  in- 
volved with  our  thoughts  upon  some  of  the  very  highest  subjects. 
To  say  that  we  do  not  need  to  understand  ourselves  upon  these  cri- 
tical questions,  that  it  is  of  no  importance  to  have  principles  in 
reference  to  them,  is  merely  to  say  that  we  ought  not  to  meddle  with 
them  at  all.    A  person  who  is  not  brought  into  contact  with  such 
topics  is  certainly  not  bound  to  think  about  them ;  if  he  be,  he  will 
find  the  absence  of  thought  respecting  them  a  more  serious  impedi- 
ment to  him  in  matters  directly  concerning  his  personal  life  than  he 
may  at  first  suppose.    Now,  if  any  one  reads  Mr.  Coleridge's  liter- 
ary life,  taking  him  to  be  a  great  poet,  and  therefore  able  to  supply 
the  principles  of  his  art  ready  made  and  fit  for  immediate  use  and  ex- 
portation, he  will,  I  should  think,  be  much  disappointed.    I  cannot 
discover,  here,  more  than  in  his  political  work,  a  system.    I  have 


10 


DEDICATION. 


lately  heard  that  there  is  one,  and  that  it  has  been  taken  whole  and 
alive  out  of  the  works  of  a  great  German  author.  But  I  am  speak- 
ing only  of  what  I  saw  there  myself,  and  am  bound  to  say  that  it 
escaped  my  notice.  I  seemed  to  see  a  writer,  who  was  feeling  his 
way  into  the  apprehension  of  many  questions  which  had  puzzled  me, 
explaining  to  me  his  own  progress  out  of  the  belief  that  all  things  are 
dependent  upon  association,  into  the  acknowledgment  of  something 
with  which  they  are  associated ;  into  a  discovery  that  there  is  a  key- 
note to  the  harmony.  I  learnt  from  him,  by  practical  illustrations, 
how  one  may  enter  into  the  spirit  of  a  living  or  a  departed  author, 
without  assuming  to  be  his  judge  ;  how  one  may  come  to  know  what 
he  means  without  imputing  to  him  our  meanings.  I  learnt  that  beauty 
is  neither  an  accidental  nor  an  artificial  thing,  that  it  is  to  be  sought 
out  as  something  which  is  both  in  nature  and  in  the  mind  of  man,  and 
which,  by  God's  law,  binds  us  to  her.  But  all  this  comes  out  in  a 
natural  experimental  method,  by  those  tests  and  trials  in  which  a  man 
may  be  greatly  assisted  by  the  previous  successes  or  failures  t>f  another, 
just  as  Faraday  may  be  assisted  by  Davy,  but  which  he  cannot  adopt 
from  another,  and  which  we  cannot  adopt  from  him,  except  by  catch- 
ing his  spirit  of  investigation  and  applying  it  to  new  facts. 

The  "  Aids  to  Reflection"  is  a  book  of  a  different  character  from 
either  of  these,  and  it  is  one  to  which  I  feel  myself  under  much  more 
deep  and  solemn  obligations.  But  the  obligation  is  of  the  same  kind. 
If  I  require  a  politician  or  a  critic  who. has  indeed  worked  his  own 
way  through  the  region  in  which  he  pretends  to  act  as  my  guide,  I 
certainly  should  be  most  dissatisfied  with  one  who  undertook  to  write 
moral  and  spiritual  aphorisms,  without  proving  that  he  was  himself 
engaged  in  the  conflict  with  an  evil  nature  and  a  reluctant  will,  and 
that  he  had  received  the  truths  of  which  he  would  make  me  a  partaker, 
not  at  second  hand,  but  as  the  needful  supports  of  his  own  being.  I 
do  not  know  any  book  which  ever  brought  to  me  more  clear  tokens 
and  evidences  of  this  kind  than  the  one  of  which  I  am  speaking.  I 
have  heard  it  described  both  by  admirers  and  objectors  as  one  which 
deals  with  religion  philosophically.  In  whatever  sense  that  assertion 
may  be  true,  and  in  a  very  important  sense  I  believe  it  is  quite  true,  I 
can  testify  that  it  was  most  helpful  in  delivering  me  from  a  number  of 
philosophical  phrases  and  generalizations,  which  I  believe  attach 
themselves  to  the  truths  of  the  Creed,  even  in  the  minds  of  many  who 
think  that  they  receive  Christianity  with  a  most  childlike  spirit — most 
helpful  in  enabling  me  to  perceive  that  the  deepest  principles  of  all 


DEDICATION. 


11 


are  those  which  the  peasant  is  as  capable  of  apprehending  and  enter- 
ing into  as  the  Schoolman.  I  value  and  love  his  philosophy  mainly 
because  it  has  led  me  to  this  discovery,  and  to  the  practical  conclusion, 
that  those  who  are  called  to  the  work  of  teaching  must  cultivate  and 
exercise  their  understandings,  in  order  that  they  may  discriminate 
between  that  which  is  factitious  and  accidental,  or  belongs  to  our  ar- 
tificial habits  of  thought,  and  that  which  is  fixed  and  eternal,  which 
belongs  to  man  as  man,  and  which  God  will  open  the  eyes  of  every 
humble  man  to  perceive.  I  have  learnt  in  this  way  the  preciousness 
of  the  simple  Creeds  of  antiquity  ;  the  inward  witness  which  a  gospel 
of  Facts  possesses,  and  which  a  gospel  of  Notions  must  always  want ; 
how  the  most  awful  and  absolute  truths,  which  notions  displace  or  ob- 
scure, are  involved  in  facts,  and  through  facts  may  be  entertained  and 
embraced  by  those  who  do  not  possess  the  faculty  for  comparing  no- 
tions, and  have  a  blessed  incapacity  of  resting  in  them. 

It  is  inevitable  that  the  person  who  first  applies  this  principle  to 
religious  questions,  should  sometimes  be  involved  in  the  obscurity 
from  which  he  is  seeking  to  deliver  us.  Any  one  who  begins  the  work 
of  encountering  notions  and  theories,  will  himself  be  accounted  the 
greatest  notionalist  and  theorist.  To  get  rid  of  crudities  and  confu- 
sions, he  will  sometimes  be  obliged  to  adopt  or  invent  a  nomenclature. 
His  rigid  adherence  to  this  will  be  called  pedantry  ;  his  followers  re- 
peating his  words,  instead  of  carrying  the  meaning  of  them  into  their 
studies  and  their  life,  will  deserve  the  charge ;  his  enemies  will  have 
a  plausible  pretence  for  saying  that  he  has  made  simple  truths  complex 
by  his  way  of  handling  them.  The  "  Aids  to  Reflection"  have  been 
exposed  to  all  these  misfortunes.  Nevertheless,  I  have  heard  them 
generally  denounced  as  unintelligible  by  persons  whom  I  had  the 
greatest  difficulty  in  understanding,  who  wTere  continually  perplexing 
me  with  hard  words  to  which  I  could  find  nothing  answering  among 
actual  things,  and  with  the  strangest  attempts  to  explain  mysteries 
by  those  events  and  circumstances  which  were  to  me  most  mysterious, 
and  which,  as  they  lay  nearest  to  me,  it  was  most  important  for  my  prac- 
tical life  that  I  should  know  the  meaning  of.  On  the  other  hand,  I  have 
heard  the  simplest,  most  childlike  men  and  women  express  an  almost 
rapturous  thankfulness  for  having  been  permitted  to  read  this  book, 
and  so  to  understand  their  own  hearts  and  their  Bibles,  and  the  con- 
nexion between  the  one  and  the  other,  more  clearly.  It  is  a  book,  I 
believe,  which  has  given  offence,  and  will  always  give  offence  to  many, 

4 


12 


DEDICATION. 


not  for  its  theories,  but  for  its  essentially  practical  character.  Its 
manly  denunciation  of  the  sentimental  school  must  be  painful  to  many 
in  our  day  who  have  practically  adopted  the  Rousseau  cant,  though 
they  have  changed  a  little  the  words  that  express  it ;  who  praise  men 
for  being  good,  though  they  do  the  most  monstrously  evil  acts,  and 
account  it  a  vulgar  worship  of  decency  to  say,  that  one  who  is  the 
slave  of  his  own  passions,  and  enslaves  others  to  them,  may  not  be  a 
very  right  and  true  man  notwithstanding.  And  yet  those  who  do 
really  exalt  decency  above  inward  truth  and  conformity  to  a  high 
standard,  will  not  at  all  the  more  own  Mr.  Coleridge  for  an  ally  be- 
cause the  school  which  pretends  to  oppose  them  reject  him.  The 
whole  object  of  his  book  is  to  draw  us  from  the  study  of  mere  worldly 
and  external  morality,  to  that  which  concerns  the  heart  and  the  inner 
man.  But  here,  again,  he  is  so  unfortunate,  that  those  who  have 
turned  "  heart  religion"  into  a  phrase — who  substitute  the  feelings 
and  experiences  of  their  minds  for  the  laws  to  which  those  feelings  and 
experiences  may,  if  rightly  used,  conduct  us — will  be  sure  to  regard 
him  as  peculiarly  their  enemy.  So  that  if  there  were  no  persons  in 
the  land  who  did  not  belong  to  one  or  other  of  these  classes,  if  there 
were  not  many  who  have  tried  them  all,  and  are  weary  of  them  all, 
it  would  indeed  be  very  difficult  to  understand  how  it  is  that  this  vol- 
ume has  found  its  way  into  so  many  studies,  and  has  gained  access  to 
so  many  hearts. 

The  idea  of  the  first  "  Lay  Sermon,"  that  the  Bible  is  the  States- 
man's Manual,  is  less  developed,  I  think,  than  any  of  those  to  which  I 
have  alluded  hitherto.  But  the  bare  announcement  of  it  has  been  of 
more  value  to  me  than  any  lengthened  exposition  that  I  know  of. 
There  is  no  topic  which  has  more  engaged  my  attention  in  these  vol- 
umes than  the  national  history  of  the  Bible,  but  I  have  said  very  little 
indeed  of  which  that  thought  was  not  the  germ. 

The  little  book  upon  Church  and  State  you  will  suppose,  from 
the  title  and  character  of  these  volumes,  that  I  am  likely  to  have 
-tiulied  still  more  attentively.  And  indeed,  if  you  watch  me  closely, 
you  will  discover,  I  doubt  not,  many  more  thoughts  which  I  have 
stolen  from  it  than  I  am  at  all  aware  of,  though  I  think  I  am  conscious 
of  superabundant  obligations.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  doctrine  which 
I  have  endeavoured  to  bring  out  in  what  I  have  said  respecting  the 
relations  between  Church  and  State,  is  nothing  but  an  expansion  of 
Mr.  Coleridge's  remark  respecting  the  opposition  and  necessary  har- 


DEDICATION. 


13 


mony  of  Law  and  Religion,  though  in  this,  as  in  many  other  cases, 
I  have  departed  from  his  phraseology,  and  have  even  adopted  one 
which  he  micrht  not  be  inclined  to  sanction. 

The  robberies  which  I  have  confessed  are  such  in  the  truest 
sense;  they  are  conscious  and  deliberate  robberies.  If  any  one  had 
chanced  to  discover  in  my  book  twenty  or  thirty  pages  which  he 
could  trace  to  some  English  or  foreign  author,  I  should  think  his 
common  sense,  though  he  might  allow  no  scope  for  charity,  would 
induce  him  to  hesitate  before  he  imputed  to  me  a  wilful  fraud.  It 
is  so  much  more  likely  that  I  should  mistake  what  had  been  for  years 
mixed  with  my  own  compositions  for  one  of  them,  than  that  I  should 
take  such  a  very  stupid  and  blundering  way  of  earning  a  reputation, 
which  a  few  years  must  destroy  altogether,  that  a  court  of  justice,  on 
the  mere  ground  of  evidence,  would  be  inclined,  I  should  suppose, 
to  take  the  tolerant  side.  If  it  had  any  hesitation,  the  reason  would 
be,  that  an  insignificant  author  might  do  many  things  with  impunity, 
which  a  writer  of  eminence,  who  had  enemies  in  every  direction, 
would  be  a  madman  to  venture  upon ;  or  else  it  would  be  from  a 
feeling  of  this  kind,  that  if  I  had  merely  forgotten  myself,  I  should 
have  had  some  vague  wandering  impression  of  having  read  a  similar 
passage  somewhere  else,  and,  therefore,  that  I  should,  being  honest, 
have  at  least  thrown  out  some  hint,  though  it  might  not  be  exactly 
the  right  one,  as  to  the  place  whence  I  might  have  derived  it,  thus 
making  my  reader  anxious  to  see  what  had  been  said  by  the  writer 
to  whom  I  referred  :  if  I  did  that,  of  course  all  suspicion  of  evil  de- 
sign would  vanish  immediately  from  the  mind  of  any  one  who  was 
capable  of  judging,  or  did  not  industriously  pervert  his  judgment  for 
the  purpose  of  making  me  out  to  be  an  offender.  But  the  use  I  have 
made  of  your  father's  writings  is  of  entirely  a  different  kind  from 
this.  I  could  not  be  convicted  of  it  by  a  mere  collating  of  para- 
graphs, and,  therefore,  if  I  were  anxious  to  conceal  it,  I  should  be 
really,  and  not  apparently,  dishonest.  And  this  is  not  the  less  true 
because  it  is  also  true  that  the  main  subject  of  my  book  is  one  which 
(so  far  as  I  know)  he  has  not  distinctly  treated  of,  that  the  thoughts 
which  he  has  scattered  respecting  it,  though  deeply  interesting,  are 
not  always  satisfactory  to  me,  that  I  have,  therefore,  very  commonly 
found  myself  without  his  guidance,  and  that  I  have  sometimes  wil- 
fully deserted  it.  I  shall  not  fulfil  the  purpose  of  this  letter,  if  I  do 
not  show  how  these  two  apparently  opposite  statements  are  reconciled. 

No  man,  I  think,  will  ever  be  of  much  use  to  his  generation,  who 


14 


DEDICATION. 


does  not  apply  himself  mainly  to  the  questions  which  are  occupying 
those  who  belong  to  it.  An  antiquary,  I  dare  to  say,  leads  a  much 
easier  and  quieter  life  than  one  who  interferes  with  his  contem- 
poraries, and  takes  part  in  their  speculations.  But  his  quietness  is 
his  reward  :  those  who  seek  another,  must  be  content  to  part  with  it. 
Oftentimes,  I  doubt  not,  every  man  is  tempted  to  repose  in  some 
little  nook  or  dell  of  thought,  where  other  men  will  not  molest  him, 
because  he  does  not  molest  them ;  but  those  to  whom  any  work  is 
assigned  are  soon  driven,  by  a  power  which  they  cannot  resist,  out 
of  such  retirement  into  the  dusty  highways  of  ordinary  business  and 
disputation.  This,  it  seems  to  me,  was  your  father's  peculiar  merit 
and  honour.  The  subjects  to  which  he  addressed  himself  were  not 
those  to  which  he  would  have  been  inclined,  either  by  his  poetical 
or  his  metaphysical  tendencies.  But  they  were  exactly  the  questions 
of  the  time ;  exactly  those  which  other  men  were  discussing  in  the 
spirit  of  the  time.  And  as  we  who  belong  to  a  younger  generation 
have  inherited  these  questions,  we  inherit  also  the  wisdom  which 
dealt  with  them.  But  there  are,  it  seems  to  me,  questions  which 
we  have  not  inherited — questions  which  belong  more  expressly  to  us 
than  they  did  to  our  immediate  predecessors.  These,  I  suspect,  we 
must  humbly  study  for  ourselves,  though  the  difference  will  be  very 
great  to  us,  whether  we  invent  a  way  of  investigation  for  ourselves, 
or  try  to  walk  in  a  path  which  better  men  who  have  been  before  us 
have  with  great  labour  cleared  of  its  rubbish,  and  by  foot-marks  and 
sign-posts  have  made  known  to  us. 

One  of  the  questions  to  which  I  allude  is  that  which  your  father 
was  led,  I  believe  by  the  soundest  wisdom,  to  banish,  in  a  great 
measure,  from  his  consideration,  after  the  events  of  the  French  Re- 
volution had  taught  him  the  unspeakable  importance  of  a  distinct  Na- 
tional life.  I  mean  the  question  whether  there  be  a  Universal  Society 
for  man  as  man.  I  have  stated  some  reasons  in  these  volumes  why  I 
think  every  one  in  this  day  must  be  more  or  less  consciously  occupied 
with  this  inquiry ;  why  no  other  topics,  however  important,  can  pre- 
vent it  from  taking  nearly  the  most  prominent  place  in  our  minds, 
There  is  another  question  belonging  apparently  to  a  different  region 
of  thought,  yet  I  believe  touching  at  more  points  than  any  one  upon 
this :  how  all  thoughts,  schemes,  systems,  speculations,  may  contri- 
bute their  quota  to  some  one  which  shall  be  larger  and  deeper  than 
any  of  them.  If  I  am  indebted  to  your  father  on  one  account  more 
than  another,  it  is  for  showing  me  a  way  out  of  the  dreadful  vague- 


EEUICATION. 


15 


ness  and  ambition  which  such  a  scheme  as  this  involves,  for  leading 
me  not  merely  to  say,  but  to  feel,  that  a  knowledge  of  The  Being  is 
the  object  after  which  we  are  to  strive,  and  that  all  pursuit  of  Unity 
without  this  is  the  pursuit  of  a  phantom.  But  at  the  same  time  I 
cannot  help  believing  that  there  is  a  right  meaning  hid  under  this 
desire ;  that  it  will  haunt  us  till  we  find  what  it  is ;  that  we  cannot 
merely  denounce  or  resist  this  inclination  in  ourselves  or  in  others; 
that  we  shall  do  far  more  good,  yea,  perhaps  the  very  good  which  we 
are  meant  in  this  age  to  accomplish,  if  we  steadily  apply  ourselves 
to  the  consideration  of  it.  Again,  there  is  a  question  which  thrusts 
itself  before  us  continually,  and  which  is  the  mover  of  more  party 
feelings  just  at  this  time  than  any  other,  respecting  the  reception  of 
those  doctrines  which  are  expressed  in  old  Creeds,  and  which  con- 
cern the  nature  of  God  himself ;  whether  these  are  to  be  taken  upon 
trust  from  the  early  ages,  or  whether  we  are  to  look  upon  them  as 
matters  for  our  own  inquiry,  to  be  acknowledged  only  so  far  as  they 
accord,  with  what  seems  to  us  either  the  declaration  of  Scripture,  or 
the  verdict  of  reason.  In  preparing  for  the  consideration  of  this 
great  subject,  I  have  felt,  with  many  others,  that  Mr.  Coleridge's 
help  has  been  invaluable  to  us.  Nearly  every  thoughtful  writer  of 
the  day  would  have  taught  us,  that  the  highest  truths  are  those  which 
lie  beyond  the  limits  of  Experience,  that  the  essential  principles  of 
the  Reason  are  those  which  cannot  be  proved  by  syllogisms,  that  the 
evidence  for  them  is  the  impossibility  of  admitting  that  which  does 
fall  under  the  law  of  experience,  unless  we  recognise  them  as  its 
foundation ;  nay,  the  impossibility  of  believing  that  we  ourselves  are, 
or  that  any  thing  is,  except  upon  these  terms.  The  atheism  of 
Hume  has  driven  men  to  these  blessed  discoveries,  and  though  it 
was  your  father's  honour  that  he  asserted  them  to  an  age  and  a  na- 
tion which  had  not  yet  discovered  the  need  of  them,  he  certainly  did 
not  pretend,  and  no  one  should  pretend,  that  he  was  the  first  reviver 
or  expositor  of  them.  But  the  application  of  these  principles  to 
Theology,  I  believe,  we  owe  mainly  to  him.  The  power  of  perceiv- 
ing that  by  the  very  law  of  the  Reason  the  knowledge  of  God  must 
be  given  to  it ;  that  the  moment  it  attempts  to  create  its  Maker,  it 
denies  itself;  the  conviction  that  the  most  opposite  kind  of  Unity  to 
that  which  Unitarianism  dreams  of  is  necesssary,  if  the  demands  of 
the  reason  are  to  be  satisfied — I  must  acknowledge,  that  I  received 
from  him,  if  I  would  not  prove  myself  ungrateful  to  the  highest 
Teacher,  who  might  certainly  have  chosen  another  instrument  for 


16 


DEDICATION. 


communicating  his  mercies,  but  who  has  been  pleased  in  very  many 
cases,  as  I  know,  to  make  use  of  this  one.  This  instruction,  I  say, 
seems  to  me  a  most  precious  preparation  for  the  inquiry  which  be- 
longs more  strictly  to  our  age,  but  still  it  is  only  a  preparation.  I 
cannot  help  feeling,  while  I  read  the  profound,  and,  to  a  theological 
student  invaluable,  hints  respecting  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity, 
which  occur  in  Mr.  Coleridge's  writings — "  This  is  not  enough.  If 
the  reason  be,  as  he  said  it  was,  expressly  the  human  faculty,  be- 
longing to  rich  and  poor  alike — not  merely  those  personal  truths 
which  belong  to  each  individual's  state  and  condition,  but  this 
highest  truth,  which  he  presents  to  us  as  demanding  the  highest  ef- 
forts of  thought  and  abstraction,  must  belong  to  the  very  humblest 
man ;  must  be  a  sacred  part  of  his  inheritance ;  must  in  some  way 
or  other  be  capable  of  being  presented  to  him."  Any  one  who  has 
entertained  this  thought  will  find  that  this  theological  subject  very 
soon  becomes  involved  with  the  other  two  of  which  I  was  speaking. 
The  hope  that  some  day 

"  Wisdom  may  teach  her  lore 
In  the  low  huts  of  them  that  toil  and  groan," 

must  wax  much  brighter,  if  we  can  really  believe  that  the  deepest 
lore  is  the  most  universal.  The  hope  that  diverse  sides  of  thought 
may  some  day  be  brought  into  reconciliation,  may  begin  to  discon- 
nect itself  with  the  dreary  vision  of  a  comprehensive  System,  from 
which  all  life  is  excluded,  if  the  central  Unity  be  that  of  the  living 
Being. 

But  how  can  such  a  dream  ever  be  realized  ?  To  me  the  pro- 
mise of  its  realization  came  in  sounds  which  belong  to  our  nursery, 
in  the  words  in  which  our  infants  are  baptized.  Here,  it  seemed  to 
me,  lay  the  assurance  that  this  truth  belongs  to  no  esoterical  region; 
that  it  is  one  of  those  all  embracing  mysteries  which  is  about  us  at 
every  moment,  which  is  gradually  drawing  us  into  itself,  and  which 
becomes  ours  most  truly  when  we  attain  most  of  the  privilege  of  men 
by  becoming  most  like  little  children.  Thus  I  was  led  to  consider 
the  meaning  of  this  ordinance  of  Baptism  as  a  key  to  the  nature  of 
ordinances  generally.  I  found  that  they  had  been  much  prized  by 
Luther,  and  by  the  most  earnest  of  those  who,  like  him,  regarded 
Christianity  almost  exclusively  in  its  reference  to  their  own  personal 
life.  They  felt  the  extreme  danger  of  substituting  their  belief  for 
the  object  of  it,  and  so  destroying  the  reality  of  both.  Their  testi- 
mony was  of  the  highest  practical  value,  and  it  was  abundantly  con 


♦ 


DEDICATION. 


17 


firmed  to  me  by  the  experience  of  those  who  had  rejected  ordinances 
for  the  sake  of  attaining  to  a  more  spiritual  state  of  mind.  Still  I 
could  not  discover  how  one  contemplating  the  subject  from  their 
point  of  view,  could  ultimately  escape  from  the  conclusion  which  the 
disciples  of  the  Reformers  have  so  generally  adopted,  that  he  who 
first  entertains  a  reverence  for  inward  Truth,  and  then  acquires  a 
reverence  for  outward  Signs,  begins  in  the  spirit,  and  is  made  per- 
fect in  the  flesh.  And  I  could  entirely  sympathize  with  the  feeling 
of  Mr.  Coleridge,  that  those  who  for  the  sake  of  exalting  Ordinances 
turn  them  into  Charms,  are  not  making  a  harmless  addition  to  that 
which  was  before  sufficient,  but  are  actually  destroying  its  meaning 
and  reality.  But  supposing  them  to  be  signs  to  the  Race — signs  of 
the  existence  of  that  universal  body  which  we  were  inquiring  after, 
they  become  invested  with  a  very  different  importance.  They  be- 
come indispensable  in  a  higher  sense  than  those  dream  of,  who  seem 
to  value  them  chiefly  as  means  of  exclusion  ;  they  are  the  very  voice 
in  which  God  speaks  to  his  creatures  ;  the  very  witness  that  their 
fellowship  with  each  other  rests  on  their  fellowship  with  Him,  and 
both  upon  the  mystery  of  his  Being  ;  the  very  means  by  which  we 
are  meant  to  rise  to  the  enjoyment  of  the  highest  blessings  which  He 
has  bestowed  upon  us.  In  this  way  there  rose  up  before  me  the  idea 
of  a  Church  Universal,  not  built  upon  human  inventions  or  human 
faith,  but  upon  the  very  nature  of  God  himself,  and  upon  the  union 
which  He  has  formed  with  his  creatures  :  a  church  revealed  to  man 
as  a  fixed  and  eternal  reality  by  means  which  infinite  wisdom  had 
itself  devised.  The  tokens  and  witnesses  of  such  a  church,  it  seemed 
to  me,  must  be  divine,  but  the  feeling  of  its  necessity,  apprehensions 
of  the  different  sides  and  aspects  of  it,  must,  if  it  be  a  reality,  be 
found  in  all  the  different  schemes  which  express  human  thought  and 
feeling.  No  amalgamation  of  these  can  create  a  real  harmony,  but 
each  may  find  its  highest  meaning  in  that  harmony  which  God  has 
created,  and  of  which  He  is  Himself  the  centre. 

These  are  the  leading  thoughts  which  in  this  book  I  have  been 
trying  to  express,  and  you  will  therefore  understand  what  I  mean 
when  I  say  that  I  may  have  uttered  innumerable  sentiments  for 
which  your  father  would  not  have  chosen  to  be  responsible,  even 
while  I  have  wished  to  study  and  apply  the  lessons  which  he  has 
taught  me.  He  would,  I  conclude,  not  have  agreed  with  me  in 
my  views  respecting  Baptism,  he  would  probably  have  thought  that 
I  over-exalted  the  Ministry,  he  would  not  have  acquiesced  in  every 


18 


DEDICATION. 


one  of  my  statements  respecting  the  Eucharist,  he  would  have  judged 
me  wrong  in  some  of  my  opinions  respecting  the  Scriptures.  Upon  all 
these  subjects  I  have  deviated  from  what  I  think  would  have  been 
his  judgment,  without  losing  the  least  of  my  reverence  and  affection 
for  his  memory,  perhaps  without  approximating  nearer  than  he  did 
to  the  sentiments  of  any  one  of  the  parties  which  divide  the  Church. 
I  am  sure  that  I  should  not  have  had  courage  to  differ  with  them  or 
him,  if  he  had  not  assisted  me  to  believe  that  Truth  is  above  both, 
most  of  all  above  myself  and  my  own  petty  notions  and  apprehen- 
sions, that  it  is  worthy  to  be  sought  after  and  loved  above  all  things, 
and  that  He  who  is  truth,  is  ready,  if  we  will  obey  Him,  to  guide  us 
into  it. 

I  have  been  so  much  occupied  with  a  subject  which  I  am  sure 
must  be  interesting  to  you  above  all  others,  that  I  have  left  myself 
no  time  to  express  as  I  should  wish  my  gratitude  for  your  personal 
kindness,  and  for  the  advantage  which  I  have  received  from  my  op- 
portunities of  intercourse  with  you.  But  I  cannot  conclude  without 
wishing  you  God  speed  in  the  noble  undertaking  in  which  you  are 
engaged.  If  you  are  permitted  to  raise  up  a  body  of  wise  and 
thoughtful  teachers  out  of  our  trading  classes,  you  will  do  more  for 
the  Church  than  all  the  persons  together  who  are  writing  treatises 
about  it.  Proportionate,  however,  to  the  importance  and  the  novelty 
of  the  work  will  be  the  trials  and  the  discouragements  attending  it. 
In  these  I  trust  you  will  be  sustained  by  the  highest  consolations 
which  a  Christian  man  and  a  Christian  priest  can  experience.  But 
there  are  times  in  which  you  will  need  lower  helps  also,  if  they  be 
but  of  the  right  kind.  I  can  scarcely  think  of  any  which  will  be 
more  cheering  to  you  than  the  recollection  that  you  are  carrying 
into  effect  principles  which  were  years  ago  urged  upon  our  country- 
men by  your  father,  and  that  you  are  doing  what  in  you  lies  to  provef 
that  one  who  has  been  called  a  theorist  and  a  dreamer,  was  in  truth 
labouring  to  procure  the  most  practical  benefits  for  his  country  and 
for  mankind. 

Believe  me, 

My  dear  Mr.  Coleridge, 

Yours  very  sincerely, 

F.  MAURICE. 


CONTENTS. 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE. 

PAOB 


A  Quakers  reason  for  being  discontented  with  his  own  Society     ....  33 

Evangelical  influences     .    34 

Unitarian  influences        ............  36 

Anglican  High  Church  arguments   37 

Romanist  arguments  »   42 

A  new  method  of  inquiry  proposed   46 


PART  I. 

ON  THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  THE  QUAKERS,  AND  OF  THE  DIFFERENT 
RELIGIOUS  BODIES  WHICH  HAVE  ARISEN  SINCE  THE  REFORM- 
ATION, AND  OF  THE  SYSTEMS  TO  WHICH  THEY  HAVE  GIVEN 
BIRTH, 

CHAPTER  I. 

QUAKERISM. 
SECTION  L 

CN  THE  POSITIVE  DOCTRINES  OP  THE  QUAKERS. 


Quakerism  as  described  by  modern  Quakers   48 

Quakerism  as  described  by  Penn  and  Fox   49 

Mental  history  of  Fox   50 

Discovery  of  man's  relation  to  the  Living  Word  .    51 

Quaker  doctrine  respecting  an  universal  light  and  a  spiritual  kingdom    ...  52 

Quaker  doctrine  of  spiritual  influences   .   '54 

SECTION  II. 

ORDINARY  OBJECTIONS  TO  THESE  DOCTRINES. 

Objection  to  the  doctrine  of  the  inward  light  or  indwelling  Word,  that  it  is  mysti- 
cal, how  far  tenable       ....    55 

Objection  to  it  as  unscriptural,  how  far  tenable   56 

Objection  to  it  as  unsupported  by  evidence  from  heathen  records,  how  far  tenable  .       .  57 

Objections  to  the  other  Quaker  doctrines   62 

SECTION  III. 

THE  V7AKBR  SYSTEM. 

Renunciation  of  formulas   63 

Renunciation  of  ordinances   64 

Renunciation  of  national  distinctions   64 


20 


CONTENTS. 


Opinion  respecting  the  Scriptures  as  an  authority  65 

Opinion  respecting  studies,  amusements,  language  65 


SECTION  IV. 

PRACTICAL  WORKING  OP  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 

What  evidence  is  admissible  on  this  subject   66 

Quaker  attempts  at  spiritual  purity,  why  abortive   67 

Quaker  attempts  at  universality,  why  abortive   68 

Quaker  attempts  at  education,  contradictory  to  the  principle  in  which  the  society 

stands   70 

Quaker  protest  against  the  world  ineffectual   70 

Final  issue  of  the  Quaker  experiment   73 


CHAPTER  II. 

PURE  PROTESTANTISM. 
SECTION  I. 

THE  LEADING  PRINCIPLES  OF  THE  REFORMATION. 

Martin  Luther — The  processes  of  his  mind — Idea  of  Justification  by  faith  .  .  75 
Second  Reformation  principle — Election — how  connected  with  the  first — How  far 

characteristic  of  Calvin  77 

Third  Reformation  principle — Authority  of  the  Scriptures — Its  relation  to  the  two 

other — Its  connection  with  Zuinglins  79 

Fourth  Reformation  principle — Distinction  of  nations  and  Rights  of  sovereigns — Its 

connection  with  the  previous  history  of  Europe — With  other  signs  of  the 

Reformation  ...   SO 


SECTION  II. 

OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 

The  objections  to  the  Lutheran  doctrines  of  Justification,  as  exalting  an  outward 

Object  of  faith  84 

Objection  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  involving  the  idea  of  Satisfaction  and  Propitiation  87 

Objection  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  mistaking  the  Act  of  Conversion  for  a  theological 

principle  89 

Objection  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  substituting  individual  Consciousness  for  the  uni- 
versal Atonement      .........  96 

Objection  to  the  Calvinistical  doctrine  of  Election,  as  interfering  with  the  ac- 
knowledgment of  men's  relation  to  the  living  Word  ......  97 

Objection  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  interfering  with  human  Obedience       ...  98 

Objection  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  substituting  the  selection  of  Individuals  for  the 

selection  of  a  Body  ............  99 

Objection  to  the  Reformation  doctrine,  respecting  the  Bible,  as  interfering  with  the 

acknowledgment  of  an  inward  Light  99 

Objection  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  asserting  the  right  of  ■private  Judgment  101 

Obje«tion  to  the  same  doctrine,  as  attributing  the  teachings  of  the  Spirit  to  individuals, 

and  not  a  body  .............  103 

The  doctrine  of  the  Reformation  respecting  Nations  104 


SECTION  III. 

PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 

Lutheranism — How  it  became  a  system — Joint  influence  of  Luther  and  Melancthon  105 

Calvinism,  the  essentially  Protestant  system — Development  of  it   ....  107 

Zuinglianism — Its  principle— Its  negative  character   109 

Arminianism — Its  relation  to  Protestantism  and  to  Popery   109 


CONTENTS.  21 
SECTION  IV. 

THE  PRACTICAL  WORKINGS  OP  THE  PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 

Luther's  feelings  respecting  his  own  work   110 

How  formularies  became  important  to  the  Lutheran   Ill 

Reaction  of  spiritual  feelings  against  them   112 

Fictions  of  Lutheranism   113 

Reaction  of  common  sense  against  them   114 

Calvinism  in  its  strength   115 

Continental  Calvinism   116 

Scotch  Calvinism   117 

English  Calvinism   121 

Final  result  of  the  pure  Protestant  experiment   122 


CHAPTER  III. 

UNITARIANISM. 

1.  Change  in  the  opinion  of  Protestants  during  the  18th  century  respecting  the 
character  and  importance  of  those  principles  which  are  not  peculiar  to  them- 


selves    ..............  123 

2.  Change  of  opinion  respecting  the  source  of  knowledge   124 

3.  Change  of  opinion  respecting  the  origin  and  principles  of  society       .       .       .  125 

The  positive  side  of  Unitarianism   126 

Effect  of  natural  studies  in  leading  to  an  impatience  of  every  doctrine  which'seemed 

to  contradict  the  idea  of  the  Divine  Unity   126 

Or  to  involve  any  qualification  of  the  Divine  benevolence  128 

Or  to  represent  the  condition  of  Humanity  as  wholly  lost   129 

Attempted  confutation  of  the  positive  parts  of  Unitarianism,  why  unsuccessful      .  130 

Its  negative  elements  how  connected  with  them   131 

Their  essential  contradiction  to  each  other   132 

Final  result  of  the  Unitarian  experiment   134 


CHAPTER  IV. 

ON  THE  TENDENCY  OF  THE  ,  RELIGIOUS,  PHILOSOPHICAL,  AND  PO- 
LITICAL MOVEMENTS  WHICH  HAVE  TAKEN  PLACE  IN  PROTESTANT 
BODIES  SINCE  THE   MIDDLE   OF  THE   LAST  CENTURY. 

SECTION  I. 

THE  RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


Methodism — How  far  a  reassertion  of  the  Protestant  principle       ....  136 

In  what  respects  it  stood  upon  a  different  ground   137 

Attempts  at  an  extra-national  religious  Organization   140 

Attempts  to  discover  a  wider  Theology  than  that  which  is  founded  upon  mere 

Protestant  principles,  in  Germany,  America,  and  Scotland  ....  142 

Attempts  to  form  a  New  Catholic  Church   149 

SECTION  II. 

PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

Materialism  of  the  eighteenth  century   150 

How  it  affected  religious  men   151 

A  gradual  revolution   152 

Its  connection  with  religious  feelings  and  principles   153 

Change  in  men's  feelings  respecting  Natural  Philosophy   155 

Modern  Poetry  and  Criticism   156 

Their  practical  effects   159 

Pure  Metaphysics— Influence  of  Kant   162 

Old  and  new  Rationalism   164 


22 


CONTENTS. 


Connection  of  new  Rationalism  with  Catholicism   166 

Inferences  from  it,  and  reactions  against  it   167 

Eclecticism   170 

Its  practical  influence  on  our  age — visible  in  all  directions   172 


SECTION  III. 

POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

Change  in  the  feelings  of  Protestants  respecting  monarchical  government       .       .  174 

Puritan  colonies  in  North  America   175 

Progress  towards  the  French  Revolution — Ordinary  Parisian  Philosophy —  Philo- 
sophy of  Rousseau — Glorification  of  Nature   176 

Effects  of  the  French  Revolution  upon  Protestant  countries — Assertion  of  the  su- 
periority of  Law  to  Nature    179 

Recent  reaction  against  these  effects. — Assertion  of  the  superiority  of  Will  to 

Law   180 

Consequence  of  this  reaction   181 

The  French  Revolution,  an  attempt  to  establish  an  Universal  Polity       .       .  183 

Reaction  against  this  attempt  in  Protestant  countries   183 

Renewal  of  the  attempt  in  different  forms,  Benthamism,  St.  Simonianism,  Owenism  184 

Result  of  these  experiments   190 

Rousseau's  doctrine  of  Education. — Reaction  against  it  in  Protestant  countries  .  190 
More  recent,  feelings  on  the  subject,  grounded  on  the  actual  circumstances  of  So- 
ciety   191 

Spiritual  tendency  of  these  feelings;  the  acknowledged  object  of  Education  to  ob- 
tain a  dominion  over  the  human  will   193 

Effort  of  States  to  obtain  a  control  over  Education — at  variance  with  this  feeling — 

how  justified   194 


PART  II. 

OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  AND  THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 
CHAPTER  I. 

RECAPITULATION. 

Popular  modern  notion  respecting  the  gradual  Substitution  of  the  Ideal  for  the 

Personal  and  Historical  ,n  religious  systems   197 

Is  it  supported  by  the  failure  of  the  Quaker  system  ?   198 

Is  it  supported  by  the  failure  of  the  Protestant  systems  ?   199 

Is  it  supported  by  the  failure  of  the  [Initarian  system  ?   201 

Popular  modern  notion  respecting  the  substitution  of  an  Idea  for  a  Spiritual 
Society — Is  it  borne  out  by  the  failure  of  the  Reformers,  the  Quakers,  the 

Unitarians,  modern  Philosophers,  to  establish  a  united  society  ?  .  .  203 
Popular  modern  notion  that  there  may  be  a  universal  society  not  grounded  upon 

Revelation   206 

Is  it  borne  out  by  the  history  of  Quakerism,  Calvinism,  Unitarianism  ?      .      .  207 

Is  it  borne  out  by  the  discoveries  of  recent  philosophers  1   208 

Popular  modern  notion  that  there  may  be  a  universal  society  not  governed  bv  an 

actual  King   209 

la  it  borne  out  by  the  history  of  Quakerism,  pure  Proetstantism,  Unitarianism  ?  .  209 


CHAPTER  II. 

INDICATIONS  OF  A  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION. 

The  existence  of  families  treated  as  unimportant  by  religious  sects  and  by  phi- 
losophers  212 

The  fact  that  they  do  exist — the  first  indication  that  a  spiritual  Order  is  appointed 

for  men — and  yet  belongs  to  them  as  voluntary  creatures   ....  212 


CONTENTS. 


23 


The  fact  that  Nations  exist,  a  second  indication  of  the  same  truth — How  con- 
nected with  the  foregoing  215 

Indication  of  a  feeling  in  men  after  a  more  comprehensive  Society       .       .       .  218' 

CHAPTER  III. 

THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW  OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 

Character  of  the  Bible  not  systematic,  but  methodical   220 

Idea  of  a  covenant  between  God  and  man — the  central  one  in  it — This  covenant 

first  wilh  a  family   221 

Secondly,  with  a  nation — Development  of  the  nation  out  of  the  family  .       .       .  223 

Wherein  the  nation  was  distinct  from  the  family   224 

How  the  nation  was  identified  with  the  family   225 

Attempts  at  Babylonian  and  universal  monarchy — How  resisted  by  the  Jewish 

nation   226 

Vision  of  a  true  Universal  Kingdom,  of  which  this  was  the  counterfeit  and  per- 
petual enemy   227 

The  JSew  Testament  begins  with  the  announcement  of  a  Kingdom    .       .      .  229 

Charge  against  this  language  that  it  is  Jewish,  considered   229 

Connection  of  this  kingdom  with  the  old  Jewish  kingdom   230 

Effects  of  the  proclamation  of  this  kingdom  upcn  different  classes  of  the  Jews    .  231 

How  interpreted  by  the  acts  of  our  Lord's  life   233 

The  establishment  of  a  Kingdom  grounded  upon  a  Name — The  consummation 

of  the  gospel  history   234 

Development  of' this  idea  through  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  and  the  different 

Epistles   234 

CHAPTER  IV. 

SIGNS  OF  A  SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 
Question  to  be  considered  240 

SECTION  I.  ; 

BAPTISM. 

Statement  of  the  fact — Use  and  prevalency  of  this  sign  240 

Is  it  connected  in  the  Gospels  with  the  Kingdom  which  our  Lord  came  to  establish  ?  241 

Inference — The  baptized  man  is  a  member  of  Christ's  spiritual  and  universal 

Kingdom    ...       .  243 

Quaker  objections  to  this  inference — "  A  spiritual  fact  cannot  be  denoted  by  an 
outward  sign" — "  It  is  false  to  give  the  sign  to  one  who  has  not  the  reality" 
— "  The  sign  is  useless  to  a  man  who  is  already  united  to  the  Divine  Word" 
— His  interpretation  of  John's  Baptism  244 

Antipaedobaptist  objections — "Those  who  have  no  spiritual  consciousness  or  capa- 
city cannot  be  admitted  to  baptism"  247 

Modern  Protestant  objections — "  There  are  two  kingdoms,  one  outward  and  one 

inward — Baptism  admits  to  the  first,  Conversion  to  the  second"  .       .       .  250 

Modern  philosophical  objections — 11  Baptism  cannot  be  the  sign  of  a  universal 
society,  it  belongs  to  the  members  of  a  certain  religious  sect" — "  It  does  not 
distinguish  the  wise  from  the  unwise" — "  It  involves  the  acknowledgment 
of  an  incomprehensible  dogma" — "It  presumes  the  existence  of  an  evil 
Spint"  .  256 

The  Romish  system — Idea  of  the  opus  operatum  263 

Why  this  idea  is  in  direct  opposition  to  that  which  has  been  set  forth  in  this  sec- 
tion     •  265 

The  Caiholic  and  Romish  doctrine  found  side  by  side  in  the  same  writers — How 

to  distinguish  them  267 


24 


CONTENTS. 


SECTION  II. 

THE  CREEDS. 


How  the  Catholic  idea  of  Baptism  reconciles  the  doctrines  of  those  who  oppose  if. 

—  Transition  to  the  Creeds  268 

The  Apostles'  Creed,  its  form,  its  relation  to  Baptism,  its  relation  to  the  Scrip- 
tural idea  of  Christ's  Kingdom  271 

The  Nicene  Creed,  wherein  it  resembles  the  Apostles',  wherein  they  differ    .       .  273 

Q,i  alcer  objection  to  1  the  outward  character  of  the  Creed'  275 

Modern  Protestant  objection.— '  The  Creeds  interfere  with  the  Bible'  .  .  .  286 
Rationalistic  objections. — 'The  Creed  embodies  an  idea,  the  historical  elements  in 

it  is  imaginary'  278 

The  Romish  System. — 'The  notions  and  opinions  of  the  Doctors  of  the  Romish 
Church  are  necessary  to  elucidate  Scripture,  and  to  supply  that  which  is 

deficient  in  it'  281 

The  Catholic  Creeds  are  a  defence  of  the  Scriptures  and  of  the  poor  man  against 

the  attempts  of  Doctors,  to  confuse  the  one,  and  rob  the  other    .      .       .  282 

SECTION  III. 

FORMS   OF  WORSHIP. 

Varieties  of  worship  in  different  countries  285 

The  existence  of  common  Liturgies  belonging  to  different  nations,  a  strange  fact  286 

Explicable  only  upon  the  hypothesis,  that  there  is  a  spiritual  and  universal  king- 
dom  287 

Quaker  objection  to  Liturgies— 1  Prayer  is  given  by  the  Spirit,  prepared  iorms 

make  it  the  utterance  of  the  will  and  reason  of  man'  288 

Objection  of  the  pure  Protestant — 1  Forms  of  Prayer  cannot  be  adapted  to  changes 

of  circumstances  and  individual  feeling'  291 

Objection  of  the  modern  Philosopher — 'The  idea  of  Worship  is  inconsistent  with 

the  immutability  and  perfection  of  God'       .......  296 

The  Romish  System. — Romish  Prayers  not  distinguished  from  Catholic  Prayers, 

by  a  chronological  line  303 

True  distinction — The  one  treats  the  Church  as  if  she  were  admitted  into  the 

presence  of  God,  the  other,  as  if  she  were  not  304 

SECTION  IV. 

THE  EUCHARIST. 

Evidence  of  permanency  and  universality  in  thi3  sign  307 

Scripture  explanation  of  it  309 

Inference — This  Sacrament  is  an  actual  and  not  an  imaginary  bond  between 

God  and,  man,  and  fulfils  the  idea  of  the  Jewish  Sacrifices      .       .  .311 

Quaker  objection. — 'The  Sacrifice  required  ot  Christians  is  real  and  personal — 

the  Encharistic  Sacrifice  is  formal  and  fantastic'  312 

Division  of  Protestant  Objections  317 

General  Objection. — 1  If  any  sacrificial  character  be  imputed  to  the  Eucharist,  the 

Sacrifice  of  Christ  on  the  Cross  was  not  complete'  318 

Zuinglian  Doctrine. — '  This  Sacrament  is  merely  the  memorial  of  a  paBt  Trans- 
action'  321 

The  Calvinistical  Doctrine. — t  There  is  a  real  presence  in  the  Sacrament  to  those 

who  believe'  326 

Lutheran  Doctrine.—'  1  he  divine  body  and  blood  are  consubstantiated  with  the  ele- 
ments'  327 

Rationalistic  Objection.—  '  The  Christian  mysteries  are  only  a  continuation  of  the 

old  heathen  mysteries'   .       .       .       .       .  329 

The  Romish  System — The  Romish  doctrine  respecting  the  eucharistic  sacrifice 
and  respecting  transubstantiation,  is  in  more  direct  opposition  to  the  Cath- 
olic idea  of  this  Sacrament,  than  it  is  to  the  doctrine  of  the  pure  Protestants  337 

Participation  of  the  Spiritual  Ijoiy  practically  denied  by  the  Romanist        .  340 

Priesthood  degraded  by  the  Romanist  341 


CONTENTS. 


25 


SECTION  V. 

THE  MINISTRY. 

Character  commonly  imputed  to  a  Sacerdotal  caste — Spirit  of  Domination — Dis- 
position to  enslave — Narrowness  342 

Idea  of  the  Christian  Ministry — All  who  belong  to  this  caste,  servants — Its  prin- 
cipal office,  absolving  or  setting  free — Its  highest  office,  a  witness  to  the 

universality  of  the  Church  343 

Connection  of  this  sign  with  the  general  idea  of  a  Spiritual  Kingdom  .       .       .  347 

How  expounded  in  the  New  Testament  .   348 

Inference — '  A  Ministry  grounded  upon  an  Episcopal  order,  and  possessing  an 

absolving  power,  is  a  permanent  institution  of  the  Christian  Church'    .  350 
Quaker  objections — 1 A  true  minister  is  made  such  by  an  inward  call' — 1  The  idea 
of  succession  belonged  to'the  Old  Dispensation' — 'A  minister  is  fitted  for 

his  work  by  the  teaching  of  the  Spirit'  351 

Presbyterian  Objections — 1  Christ  is  the  only  Bishop  of  his  Church' — 1  The  Bishop 
is  not  in  Scripture  distinguished  from  the  Presbyter' — 1  The  Episcopal  or- 
der has  introduced  corruption  and  secularity  into  the  Church'    .       .       .  367 
Objections  to  the  absolving  power  in  Ministers — 1  The  minister  sets  the  conscience 
free  by  preaching  ;  when  he  tries  to  absolve  in  any  other  sense,  he  usurps 

the  power  of  his  Master'  *  373 

Objection  of  the  followers  of  Mr.  Irving — 1  There  should  be  an  order  of  Apostles 

superior  to  that  of  Bishops'  377 

Philosophical  Objections — 1  Men  of  letters  and  of  science  are  the  true  priests'      .  382 
Tfte  Romish  System — The  Romish  System  maintains  a  vicarial,  the  Catholic 
Church  a  representative  priesthood — These  two  ideas  are  in  direct  contra- 
diction to  each  other  386 

How  the  Romanist  has  destroyed  the  idea  of  absolution  by  his  vicarial  doctrine  388 

How  he  has  set  at  nought  the  Episcopacy  389 

How  he  has  destroyed  the  connection  between  the  Jewish  and  Christian  economy  391 

SECTION  YL 

THE  SCRIPTURES. 

The  Scriptures  interpret  the  other  signs  of  the  Spiritual  Kingdom,  but  are  also 

themselves  signs  of  it  392 

The  Canon  explained  by  looking  at  the  Scriptures  in  this  light    ....  393 

Different  methods  of  interpreting  them  reconciled  393 

The  Question,  where  are  the  interpreters  of  the  book  to  be  found?  considered  384 
The  question,  how  criticism  can  be  applied  to  the  Scriptures?  considered   .       .  396 
The  question  of  inspiration,  and  of  the  relation  of  Scriptures  to  other  books,  con- 
sidered   ...  402 

The  question  of  miracles  considered  409 

The  question  of  the  Gospel  narratives  considered  412 

The  Romish  System — The  Romish  doctrine  respecting  the  concealment  of  the 
Scriptures  from  the  Laity — The  inspiration  and  miracles  of  particular  men, 
and  the  lives  of  particular  saints  considered  in  reference  to  this  subject    .  416 

CHAPTER  V. 

ON  THE  RELATIONS  OF  THE   CHURCH  AND  NATIONAL  BODIES. 
INTRODUCTORY. 

Different  views  as  to  the  permanence  of  the  Jewish  institutions    ....  424 

The  Ten  Commandments   424 

Illustration  of  these  commandments  from  Pagan  history      ,       .       .       .       .  426 

The  institutions  to  which  these  commandments  refer,  exist  in  Modern  Europe  427 

They  may  be  national  institutions  and  yet  divine               .  429 

Punishments,  Oaths,  War,  belong  to  the  religion  of  the  Jewish  State  .  429 

And  of  every  heathen  State   430 


26 


CONTENTS. 


They  cannot  belong  to  our  Dispensation  if  they  are  prohibited  in  the  New  Tes- 
tament— They  may  belong  to  it,  though  they  are  not  enjoined  in  the  New 

Testament   431 

The  relation  between  Spiritual  and  National  life  exhibited  in  the  Old  Testament  433 

Exhibited  in  Pagan  history — Lost  under  the  Roman  empire   434 

The  Christian  Kingdom  felt  to  be  incompatible  with  this  empire  ....  435 

Attempted  union  with  it   436 

Overthrow  of  the  Roman  empire,  and  gradual  rise  of  national  societies  under  the 

influence  of  the  Church   436 

SECTION  L 

OBJECTIONS   OP  THE  QUAKER. 

1  The  Sermon  on  the  Mount  annuls  the  laws  of  the  old  dispensation'  .  .  440 
'  A  national  provision  for  ministers  is  unchristian'  467 

SECTION  II. 

THE  PURE  THEOCRATIST. 

4  The  Nation  is  to  be  used  for  religious  purposes' — The  Covenanter — The  Millenna- 

rian — The  Non-juror  470 

SECTION  III. 

THE  SEPARATIST. 

'  The  union  of  the  Church  with  the  State  is  the  union  of  an  antisecular  with  a  sec- 
ular body'     .   474 

SECTION  IV. 

THE  PATRICIAN. 

'  The  golden  age  of  the  Church  was  that  which  existed  before  the  rise  of  national 

life  in  Europe'  478 


SECTION  V. 

TnE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 

1  If  the  Church  and  the  nations  be  united  according  to  the  idea  set  forth  in  this 
chapter,  the  education  of  each  nation  must  belong  to  the  Church — Such  a 
pretence  was  always  dangerous,  is  now  intolerable'  495 

SECTION  VI. 

THE  MODERN   INTERPRETERS  OP  PROPHECY. 

'The  constitution  of  Society  cannot  be  right  and  divine  now,  for  Christ  at  his 
second  coming  will  make  all  things  new' — 4  The  Jewish  nation  is  the  divine 
nation' — 4  The  Latin  Church  is  apostate,  and  will  be  cut  off" '       .       .       .  506 

PART  III. 

THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH  AND  THE  SYSTEMS  WHICH  DIVIDE  IT. 

CHAPTER  I. 
INTRODUCTORY. 

HOW  FAR  THIS  SUBJECT  IS    CONNECTED  WITH    THOSE  PREVIOUSLY 

DISCUSSED. 

What  the  inquiries  of  the  English  Churchman  ought  to  be  518 


I 


CONTENTS.  27 
SECTION  I. 

DO   THE   SIGNS   OF  AN   UNIVERSAL  AND  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION  EXIST   IN  ENGLAND  * 

All  the  Catholic  institutions  exist  here   519 

The  meaning  attached  to  these  deduced  from  the  Liturgy— The  meaning  of  the  Lit- 
urgy from  the  complaints  of  those  who  object  to  it  520 

The  relative  claims  of  the  two  sets  of  persons  in  England  who  call  themselves 

Catholics,  to  represent  the  Church  527 

The  Articles— the  first  division  of  them  sets  aside  the  Calvinistic  system— The 
second  division  the  Romish— The  Calvinistical  principle  asserted  in  the  one 
as  the  Catholic  is  in  the  other  527 

section  n. 

DOES   THE   UNIVERSAL  CHURCH    IN   ENGLAND   EXIST  APART   FROM  ITS   CIVIL  INSTITUTIONS, 
OR  IN  UNION  WITH  THEM  1 

The  answer  to  this  question  unanimous   531 

The  nature  of  the  union  determined  from  history  ~  .       ......  531 

How  affected  by  the  Reformation   533 

How  affected  by  subsequent  events   533 

SECTION  III. 

WHAT   IS   THE   FORM    OF    CHARACTER   WHICH    BELONGS    ESPECIALLY  TO   ENGLISHMEN  1  TO 
WHAT   DEPRAVATION    IS  IT   LIABLE  1 

The  ordinary  answer  ihat  Englishmen  are  essentially  political,  the  true  one    .       .  537 

We  cannot  throw  off  this  character   538 

That  part  of  our  literature  is  the  noblest  which  exhibits  it  most  strikingly      .       .  539 

It  is  not  unfavourable  to  the  highest  virtue  and  devotion   539 

It  belongs  equally  to  all  parties   .       .  540 

How  it  was  depraved  in  the  period  between  the  English  and  the  French  Revolution  541 

Form  which  it  assimed  in  the  reign  of  George  III   542 

Attempt  to  discover  a  substitute  for  it   543 

CHAPTER  II. 

THE   E2VGLISH  SYSTEMS. 
SECTION  I. 

THE  LILERAL  SYSTEM — THE  EVANGELICAL  SYSTEM — THE  HIGH  CHURCH  OR  CATHOLIC  SYSTEM. 

The  Liberal  protest  against  English  orthodoxy — '  It  is  opposed  to  all  improvement 

and  comprehension'   544 

The  Evangelical  protest  against  it — 1  It  substitutes  conduct  for  faith'      ■       .       .  544 

The  Catholic  protest  against  it — 1  It  confounds  the  Church  with  the  civil  power'    .  545 

SECTION  II. 

REFLECTIONS  ON  THESE   SYSTEMS    AND   ON  OUR  POSITION  GENERALLY. 

Importance  not  of  one,  but  of  all  these  protests   546 

Value  and  truth  of  the  Liberal  principle  ;  it  is  contradicted  by  the  Liberal  system  546 
Value  and  troth  of  the  Evangelical  principle;  it  is  contradicted  by  the  Evangelical 

system  ~.  547 

Value  and  truth  of  the  Catholic  principle  ;  it  is  contradicted  by  the  Catholic  system  548 

Mutual  charges  of  these  parties,  how  far  true   551 

How  they  may  be  made  useful  to  our  old  English  feeling — How  they  actually 

threaten  to  destroy  it     ....    553 

How  an  English  Churchman  may  serve  his  country  without  belonging  to  a  party   .  556 

Conclusion  •  566 


28 


CONTENTS. 


NOTES. 

Note  A. — Extracts  from  St.  Augustipe,  illustrating  the  primitive  mode  of  teaching 


Catechumens,  and  arguing  with  heretics   571 

Note  B. — Remarks  on  a  passage  in  Tittmann's  Meletemata  Sacra  .  '  .       .  575 

Note  C — On  the  modern  treatment  of  ancient  philosophers   578 

Note  D. — 0,i  the  writings  of  Philo   582  - 

Note  E. — On  the  charges  against  the  Alexandrian  fathers  ,  588 

Note  on  German  Protestantism      .    591 

Note  on  the  Athanasian  Creed   592 


ERRATUM. 

P.  65,  third  line  from  bottom,  for  members,  read  nucleus. 


ADVERTISEMENT. 


This  work  appeared  originally  in  the  form  of  Letters  to  a  Mem- 
ber of  the  Society  of  Friends.  It  was  suggested  by  a  controversy 
which  was  dividing  the  Quaker  society.  Its  main  object  was  to  in- 
quire whether  an  acknowledgment  of  the  spiritual  principles,  which 
were  professed  by  the  Quaker  body,  involved  the  rejection  of  Chris- 
tian ordinances,  or  whether  one  did  not  necessarily  imply  the  other 
This  question  was  almost  identical  with  another.  The  Quakers  had 
sought  to  establish  a  spiritual  kingdom  in  the  world.  Did  not  such 
a  Kingdom  exist  already,  and  were  not  these  ordinances  the  expres- 
sion of  it  ? 

Among  many  minor  but  serious  mistakes  in  my  treatment  of  this 
subject,  I  found  that  there  was  one  which  had  tended  to  make  my 
purpose  unintelligible.  The  early  Quakers  affirmed,  that  the  Spirit- 
ual Kingdom  was  denned  by  no  national  boundaries.  But  the 
Quaker  Society  has,  in  fact,  existed  only  in  England  and  in  Ame- 
rica. As  I  wished  to  show  the  Quaker  to  whom  I  wrote  that  there 
was  a  spiritual  body  in  which  he  himself  might  find  a  home,  when 
the  Quaker  sect  no  longer  afforded  him  one,  I  naturally  alluded,  in 
every  Letter,  to  the  English  Church — speaking  of  her  sacraments, 
ministers,  forms  of  worship,  &c.  It  seemed,  therefore,  to  many, 
that  I  was  composing  an  apology  for  this  Church.  But  if  so,  how. 
it  was  asked,  had  I  fulfilled  my  promise  of  showing  the  Quakers  that 
there  was  a  Church  Universal,  such  as  they  had  dreamed  of? 

I  found  that  my  book  had  been  much  more  read  by  members  of 
my  own  communion  than  by  Quakers.  Some  of  my  friends,  there- 
fore, naturally  suggested,  that  in  any  new  edition  I  should  convert  it 


30 


ADVERTISEMENT. 


into  a  Treatise  on  the  Church,  leaving  out  all  reference  to  the  sect, 
for  the  sake  of  which  it  had  been  written,  This  advice  I  could  not 
take.  If  I  have  been  able  to  suggest  any  thought  to  a  Churchman 
which  he  will  not  find  far  better  set  before  him  in  a  hundred  other 
books,  I  owe  it  to  the  circumstances  which  induced  me  to  attempt 
a  comparison  between  our  own  position  and  that  of  those  who  seem 
to  be  at  the  greatest  distance  from  us.  Moreover,  it  is  obvious,  from 
what  I  have  just  said,  that  if  I  lost  sight  of  the  Quakers,  I  should 
abandon  one  means  of  repairing  the  error  which  I  have  committed. 
By  following  out  their  line  of  thought,  we  may  have  a  good  hope  of 
learning  how  men  of  earnest  minds  have  been  brought  to  feel  that 
they  need  a  Catholic  Church,  and  not  merely  a  National  Church. 

But  though  I  cannot  cease  to  connect  my  hints  with  the  princi- 
ples of  the  Quakers,  I  find  that  I  am  almost  obliged  to  omit  any 
allusion  to  the  particular  controversy  which  led  me  to  address  them. 
For  that  controversy  appears  to  be  at  an  end,  and  the  Society  is 
much  more  likely  to  perish  by  a  slow  decay,  than  by  a  sudden  con- 
vulsion. Owing  to  this  circumstance,  and  to  others  of  a  more  pri- 
vate nature,  the  form  of  Letters,  which  I  originally  adopted,  is  no 
longer  applicable.  I  have  been  induced,  therefore,  to  rewrite  and 
reconstruct  my  book ;  and  thus  I  hope  to  remove,  in  some  degree, 
the  fault  of  which  I  have  spoken.  I  have  endeavoured  also  to  remove 
some  of  the  more  gross  and  palpable  errors,  which  I  discovered  in  it 
myself,  or  were  pointed  out  to  me  by  others.  Enough,  I  doubt 
not,  remain ;  and  in  the  additions  which  I  have  made,  others  may 
have  been  introduced.  It  will  never,  I  hope,  be  regarded  as  any 
thing  but  a  collection  of  Hints,  which,  if  they  lead  the  reader  into 
deeper  thought  and  greater  reverence,  may  soon  be  the  means  of 
making  him  far  wiser  than  his  instructor. 

The  following  Dialogue  will  explain  how  the  subject  of  the  whole 
book  is  connected  with  the  history  of  the  Quaker  body.  The  con- 
versation is,  as  to  its  form,  an  imaginary  one ;  but  I  have  often  express- 
ed the  same  sentiments  in  intercourse  with  members  of  the  Society, 
and  the  Quaker's  description  of  the  trials,  to  which  a  thoughtful  man 
who  has  found  a  sectarian  position  no  longer  tenable  is  exposed 


ADVERTISEMENT. 


31 


from  within  and  without,  may,  I  believe,  be  regarded  as  an  "  ower 
true  tale."* 

*  My  readers  are  of  course  aware,  that  the  Archbishop  of  Dublin  has  lately  pub- 
lished a  work  entitled,  The  Kingdom  of  Christ  Delineated."  From  a  feeling  of 
respect  to  so  distinguished  an  author,  as  well  as  on  selfish  grounds,  I  should  have 
been  disposed  to  change  my  title  as  soon  as  I  knew  that  it  had  been  so  appropriat- 
ed. But  it  will  be  seen  that  the  description  of  the  book  is  very  closely  connected 
with  the  intention  of  it,  and  that  the  present  edition  answers  more  strictly  to  the 
name  than  the  former  did.   I  am,  therefore,  obliged  to  retain  it. 


THE 

KINGDOM  OF  CHRIST. 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE  WITH  A  QUAKER. 

Quaker.  Are  you  serious  in  saying,  that  you  do  not  wish  me 
to  forsake  the  Society  in  which  I  have  been  educated  ? 

Author.  I  did  not  say  that.  I  hope  that  you  will  not  forsake 
the  principles  in  which  you  have  been  educated. 

Q.  You  mean  those  general  principles  of  morality  and  that 
common  Christianity,  which  you  and  I  have  been  alike  taught  to 
revere  ? 

A.  No;  that  is  not  my  meaning.  Whatever  those  general 
principles  and  common  doctrines  may  be  I  do  not  believe  that  you 
will  retain  them,  unless  you  retain  also  those  which  are  proper  to 
Quakerism. 

Q.  What  can  that  imply,  except  that  I  ought  to  continue  in 
the  Society  1 

A.  I  can  answer  that  question  better,  if  you  will  tell  me  what 
are  your  present  inducements  to  leave  it. 

Q.  The  story  is  a  long  one.  I  am  afraid  you  will  not  hear  me 
to  the  end  of  it.  I  think  I  was  first  startled  by  a  contradiction 
which  I  remarked  between  the  profession  and  the  practices  of  our 
members. 

A.  You  may  make  many  changes  before  you  find  a  body  in 
which  the  same  observation  will  not  force  itself  upon  you. 

Q.  I  am  quite  aware  of  it ;  and  I  hope  I  have  common  sense 
enough  not  to  part  with  any  serious  conviction,  because  hypocrites 
may  feign  to  possess  it,  or  a  good  man  may  hold  it  with  a  feeble 
grasp.  That  was  not  my  difficulty.  The  contradiction  I  noticed 
seemed  to  me  to  infect  all  the  arrangements,  nay,  in  some  de- 

3 


34 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 


gree,  the  very  constitution  of  our  Society.  We  are  witnesses  for 
spirituality ;  I  feel  as  if  we  were  rank  formalists. 

A.  Corruption  may  have  crept  into  your  system  ;  but  why 
judge  of  it  by  its  present  appearances  ?  Is  there  no  possibility  of 
reformation  ? 

Q.  For  a  long  time  I  believed  there  was.  I  said  to  myself,  I 
will  study  the  writings  of  the  early  Quakers.  I  shall  find  in  them 
that  higher  and  purer  spirit  which  seems  to  have  departed  from  us. 

A.  Were  you  disappointed  ? 

Q.  I  thought  not.  The  writers  I  studied  manifested  deep 
earnestness,  courage,  self-denial,  an  intense  conviction  that  what 
they  said  was  true,  a  readiness  to  live  and  die  that  others  might 
hear  it. 

A.  You  concluded,  therefore,  that  your  Society  had  a  sound 
foundation  to  rest  upon? 

Q.  If  I  had  been  convinced  of  that,  I  do  not  think  I  should  have 
despaired  of  its  present  state.  But  here  lay  my  perplexity.  Since 
I  had  read  the  Scriptures  diligently  and  had  known  something  of 
my  own  heart,  the  statements  which  I  heard  from  our  Quaker 
ministers  respecting  human  depravity,  the  grace  of  God,  the  re- 
demption by  Christ,  had  seemed  to  me  for  the  most  part  vague  and 
unsatisfactory.  Still  the  doctrines  upon  these  subjects,  which  are 
ordinarily,  and  I  think  rightly,  called  Evangelical,  are  recognised 
among  us ;  by  some  they  are  brought  out  prominently.  On  the 
contrary,  by  those  older  Quakers,  whom  on  some  grounds  I  felt  so 
much  disposed  to  admire,  these  doctrines  are  far  less  distinctly  ex- 
hibited ;  other  Christians  seem  to  be  blamed  for  attaching  import- 
ance to  them ;  sometimes  expressions  are  used  which  are  almost 
incompatible  with  the  belief  of  them. 

A.  Did  you  think  that  they  substituted  some  notions  of  their 
own  for  these  doctrines  1 

Q.  I  reluctantly  adopted  that  suspicion,  and  this  it  is  which 
makes  me  wonder  that  you  should  talk  about  my  retaining  the 
principles  of  Quakerism.  These  principles  are,  it  seems  to  me,  in 
opposition  to  what  I  suppose  you  consider  the  leading  tenets  of  the 
Gospel. 

A.  How  did  you  arrive  at  that  persuasion  ? 

Q.  I  was  led  to  it  by  the  workings  of  my  own  mind,  and  then 


WITH  A  QUAKER 


35 


it  was  confirmed  to  me  by  the  testimony  of  two  persons,  who  in 
many  of  their  views  were  at  variance. 
A.  Who  were  these  ? 

Q.  The  first  was  an  Independent  dissenter.  He  expressed 
strong  admiration  of  the  language  and  conduct  of  Fox  and  Penn 
on  many  occasions.  He  said  indeed  that  he  could  not  join  them  in 
objecting  to  all  pecuniary  provision  for  ministers,  in  their  dislike 
of  baptism  and  in  several  points  of  that  kind;  but  that  he  heartily 
wished  the  energy  which  they  displayed  in  denouncing  ecclesiasti- 
cal superstitions  and  oppressions  would  communicate  itself  to  En- 
glish dissenters. 

A.  Surely  this  was  most  complimentary  language. 

Q.  But  when  he  came  to  speak  of  Fox's  theological  tenets, 
he  adopted  an  entirely  different  tone.  He  described  him  as  a  mys- 
tic, ignorant  of  the  truths  of  the  Gospel,  the  proclaimer  of  theories 
which  utterly  subverted  them.  The  same  opinion  was  maintained, 
if  possible,  with  more  earnestness  by  a  clergyman  of  your  Church, 
who  was  present  at  the  time.  Much,  he  said,  as  he  disliked  the  in- 
decorous and  violent  language  of  Fox  respecting  the  Established 
Church,  he  considered  his  doctrine  of  an  Inward  Light  immeasura- 
bly more  dangerous  than  such  language  could  ever  be.  It  was 
utterly  incompatible  with  the  Bible,  and  with  the  experience  of 
every  true  Christian. 

A.  You  remember  perhaps  some  of  the  arguments  by  which 
your  two  friends  defended  these  positions  ? 

Q.  I  do  not  think  their  arguments  made  so  much  impression 
upon  my  mind  as  the  clear  and  settled  persuasion  which  they  both 
alike  entertained,  that  if  Fox  were  right,  the  Bible  must  be  wrong. 
You  may  smile  at  my  confession  that  I  attached  weight  to  such 
assertions,  when  I  cannot  recall  the  evidence  which  was  pro- 
duced for  them ;  but  I  know  very  well,  that  assertions  which  pro- 
ceed from  deep  conviction  do  often  affect  me  more  than  elaborate 
and  logical  proofs. 

A.  The  case  is  the  same  with  me.  I  shall  not,  therefore,  ridi- 
cule your  acknowledgment. 

Q.  I  am  glad  to  hear  it  j  for  I  do  not  find  that  ridicule  in  gen- 
eral acts  profitably  upon  my  mind.  These  two  gentlemen,  the 
dissenter  and  the  evangelical  clergyman,  after  they  had  impressed 


36  INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 

me  very  strongly  by  their  serious  objections,  thought  it  expedient 
to  indulge  their  humour  at  the  expense  of  our  founders  and  their 
mystical  notions. 

A.  When  they  had  entered  the  castle,  they  were  naturally  anx- 
ious to  dismantle  it. 

Q.  They  took  away  more  defences  from  me  than  perhaps  they 
meant.  While  they  were  with  me,  I  felt  as  if  I  were  bound  to  say 
something  in  behalf  of  feelings  and  thoughts  which  from  my  child- 
hood I  had  held  sacred,  even  though  they  might  be  deserting  me. 
When  I  was  left  alone,  I  found  that  I  had  indeed  supported  my 
Quakerism  inadequately ;  but  I  had  perceived  rents  and  hollows  in 
their  system,  of  which  I  was  not  previously  aware.  Their  wit 
succeeded  in  shaking  my  reverence  at  once  for  my  own  faith,  and 
for  that  which  I  had  hoped  would  have  been  a  substitute  for  it. 

A.  A  melancholy  state  of  mind  indeed,  as  all  who  have  known 
it  can  testify. 

Q.  While  I  was  under  the  influence  of  these  feelings,  I  read  two 
Unitarian  books,  one  written  by  an  Englishman  of  the  last  century, 
one  by  an  American  of  the  present. 

A.  The  former  at  least  did  not  treat  your  mystical  feelings  with 
more  indulgence  than  your  evangelical  friends  had  shown  towards 
them  % 

Q.  No ;  but  he  taught  me,  that  it  was  possible  to  throw  quite 
as  good  ridicule  upon  the  Calvinistical  doctrine,  as  they  and  he 
were  agreed  in  throwing  upon  mine.  The  value  of  his  critical  re- 
marks and  discoveries  I  was  not  able  to  appreciate ;  but  he  said 
enough  to  convince  me  that  Scripture  had  been  often  strained  to 
make  out  a  case  in  favour  of  the  opinions  which  he  attacked,  and 
that  the  number  of  positive  texts  in  their  favour  was  far  smaller  than 
I  had  fancied.  Moreover,  his  views  of  the  character  of  God  and 
his  feelings  respecting  his  fellow-creatures  accorded  better  with  the 
testimony  of  my  conscience,  than  those  which  I  had  been  wont  to 
hear  from  the  members  of  any  sect  except  my  own. 

A.  The  impression  he  left  upon  your  mind  then  was  on  the 
whole  pleasing  1 

Q.  By  no  means.  My  feeling,  when  I  laid  down  the  book, 
was  one  of  utter  coldness  and  dreariness.  The  very  idea  of  a  spir- 
itual world  and  of  a  spiritual  life  seemed  to  be  wanting  in  it ;  ma- 


WITH  A  QUAKER. 


37 


terialism  was  the  ultimate  point  to  which  all  its  speculations  were 
tending,  if  it  were  not  the  basis  of  them. 

A.  But  that  was  not  the  case,  I  should  think,  with  the  Ameri- 
can ? 

Q.  No;  he  was  a  person  of  a  very  different  temper.  Some  of 
his  statements  were  not  unlike  those  which  I  had  met  with  in  Fox 
and  Penn.  His  mind  was  more  comprehensive  than  theirs  ;  more 
capable  of  taking  interest  in  ordinary  affairs  and  general  literature, 
but  scarcely  less  morally  exalted — I  was  at  times  inclined  to  say — 
scarcely  less  spiritual. 

A.  You  could  acquiesce  comfortably  in  his  religious  scheme  ? 

Q.  I  almost  fancied  that  I  could  ;  there  was  something  so  very 
capacious  and  engaging  in  it.  But  just  as  I  had  finished  the  book, 
I  fell  ill,  and  before  I  recovered  I  received  news  of  the  death  of  one 
of  my  oldest  and  dearest  friends.  Then  all  my  interest  both  in  the 
Englishman  and  the  American  vanished  ;  I  think  I  disliked  the 
last  most,  because  his  promises  were  the  fairest. 

A.  But  did  not  you  say  you  had  traced  a  fine  vein  of  humanity 
and  spirituality  in  him  1 

Q.  I  thought  so ;  but  let  him  be  as  humane  or  as  spiritual  as 
he  would,  he  was  not  personal.  There  was  nothing  in  him  from 
which  a  soul,  struggling  with  life  and  death,  could  derive  the  least 
help.  He  was  evidently  meant  for  sunshine  and  gala  days.  Then 
I  recollected  the  words  of  my  evangelical  friends,  and  the  doctrines 
which  they  had  set  before  me.  These  seemed  to  me  in  that  mo- 
ment all  important.  I  bitterly  accused  myself  for  having  thought 
them  narrow  and  hard.  What  had  I  to  do  with  large  views  about 
men's  happiness  or  the  character  of  God  ?  My  own  individual 
soul  was  at  war,  and  he  who  could  show  me  a  way  of  peace  for  it 
was  the  friend  I  wanted.  With  other  matters  it  seemed  now  that 
I  had  no  right  to  trouble  myself. 

A.  On  your  recovery  you  probably  sought  the  advice  of  the 
Independent  dissenter  whom  you  named  ? 

Q.  On  some  accounts  I  desired  rather  to  have  another  interview 
with  the  clergyman  who  had  spoken  so  strongly  against  Fox  and 
mysticism ;  but  just  at  that  time  he  left  the  neighbourhood.  His 
successor  in  the  parish  was,  I  heard,  an  author ;  so  I  purchased  his 
books  before  I  ventured  to  call  upon  him. 


38 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 


A.  Did  they  encourage  you  to  expect  assistance  from  him? 

Q.  I  thought  I  had  been  shaken  enough  before  by  my  own 
discoveries,  and  by  the  words  of  my  different  counsellors ;  but  it 
seems  not:  these  books  were  to  upset  me  altogether. 

A.  How?  You  encountered  a  skeptic  in  the  disguise  of  a 
clergyman  ? 

Q.  Oh,  no  ;  he  was  the  most  vehement  enemy  of  all  skepticism. 
He  said  doctrines  had  been  delivered  in  the  earliest  ages  of  Chris- 
tianity which  it  behooved  us  to  receive  with  a  simple  uninquiring 
faith  ;  that  the  blessings  of  salvation  were  connected  with  our  sub- 
mission to  a  certain  system  which  had  been  ordained  by  God;  that 
in  the  evangelical  teaching  this  system  had  been  almost  entirely 
forgotten,  or  treated  as  if  it  were  merely  a  point  of  external  arrange- 
ment ;  that  that  teaching  spoke  of  a  period  of  conversion  in  which 
men  passed  from  death  unto  life,  while  the  Church  and  Scripture 
referred  this  wonderful  change  to  baptism. 

A.  You  did  not  believe  these  statements ;  why  then  did  they 
affect  you  so  powerfully? 

Q.  Partly  perhaps  because  they  were  uttered  with  that  strong 
and  deep  conviction  which  I  have  confessed  does  always  act  most 
strongly  upon  me,  especially  if  it  be  supported,  as  I  know  in  the 
case  of  this  clergyman  it  is,  by  the  testimony  of  a  laborious  and 
self-denying  life.  But  yet  I  think  there  was  another  cause.  A 
person,  who  has  suffered  severely  from  religious  struggles,  has  an 
inward  sighing  after  rest  which  no  one  else  can  know.  Bruised, 
beaten,  humbled,  he  cannot  help  listening  to  any  one  who  tells  him 
that  he  has  been  all  wrong  ;  he  has  been  so  tormented  by  his  own 
miserable  experiments  and  failures,  that  he  must  rejoice  to  hear 
that  he  ought  to  give  them  up  altogether.  After  many  struggles 
therefore  with  my  pride  and  my  modesty,  the  shame  of  uttering  my 
feelings  and  the  pain  of  hiding  them,  I  thought  I  would  state  my 
difficulties  to  the  new  clergyman. 

A.  He  can  scarcely  have  looked  for  a  proselyte  from  such  a 
quarter. 

Q.  He  evidently  did  not  desire  one;  and  as  I  had  been  used  to 
meet  persons  who  spared  no  pains  to  bring  me  over  to  their  ways 
of  thinking,  the  change  was  so  far  rather  agreeable.  But  besides 
this  he  evidently  did  not  understand  me ;  nay,  if  I  was  not  mistaken, 


WITH  A  QUAKER. 


39 


he  thought  it  would  be  a  wrong  thing  to  understand  me.  I  dare 
say  that  I  stammered  and  spoke  incoherently  when  I  tried  to  tell 
him  the  thoughts  that  were  in  my  mind.  One  cannot  speak  quite 
so  clearly  about  one's  self  as  about  the  weather  and  the  crops,  and 
indeed  he  made  so  many  efforts  to  turn  the  conversation  to  those 
subjects,  and  fixed  such  steady  clear  cold  eyes  upon  me  when  I 
asked  him  for  information  upon  any  others,  that  I  certainly  did  not 
exhibit  less  embarrassment  at  the  close  than  at  the  beginning  of 
our  interview. 

A.  How  did  he  show  that  he  misunderstood  you? 

Q.  You  know  how  I  was  educated — to  look  upon  all  forms  and 
ordinances  as  sinful.  Such  thoughts  had  grown  with  my  growth, 
and  strengthened  with  my  strength.  But  of  late  I  have  repeatedly 
felt  as  if  these  forms  might  be  desirable ;  nay,  as  if  there  were 
something  in  me  which  needed  them.  It  was  on  this  point  espe- 
cially that  I  wished  to  speak  to  Mr.  .    I  knew  that  there  were 

many  things  which  it  might  not  be  right  that  he  should  teach  me 
at  present;  but  I  thought  that  a  person,  who  looked  upon  forms  as 
most  important  to  our  moral  life,  might  have  removed  some  of  the 
difficulties  which  clouded  ray  mind  in  reference  to  them,  or  at  least 
have  interpreted  some  of  those  desires  and  longings,  which,  in  spite 
of  my  prejudices,  I  had  conceived  for  them.  But  this  wish  he 
seemed  to  consider  irreverent  and  presumptuous.  "  I  can  enter," 
he  said,  "  into  no  explanations  with  you ;  you  are  not  in  a  state  to 
understand  explanations ;  you  have  one  plain  duty  to  perform — 
submit  to  the  ordinances  of  Christ's  Church,  confess  the  sins  of  your 
fathers  in  withdrawing  from  it,  and  your  own  in  continuing  the 
schism;  receive  Christian  Baptism;  then  I  shall  be  happy  to  in- 
struct you."  "I  am  much  inclined  to  take  this  course,"  I  replied. 
"  but  I  feel  some  difficulties  and  scruples  which  I  do  not  know  how 
to  overcome."  "  Sir,"  he  said,  "  the  case  may  be  stated  verv 
shortly  to  you.  The  Fathers  of  the  Church,  the  Saints  and  Mar- 
tyrs of  the  first  five  centuries,  the  Greek  Church,  the  Romish  Church, 
the  English  Church,  all  agree  that  Baptism  is  the  one  only  door  by 
which  we  can  enter  into  Christ's  fold,  and  therefore  into  everlast- 
ing life.  An  ignorant  mechanic  in  the  17th  century  said  that  there 
was  some  other  door — you  have  chosen  to  disbelieve  the  whole 
Catholic  Church,  and  to  follow  the  mechanic.    Is  this  a  safe  pro- 


40 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 


ceeding  ?  If  a  speculation  in  cloth  or  wool  were  proposed  to  you, 
and  a  hundred  competent  judges  said  it  would  be  your  ruin — one 
person,  totally  unacquainted  with  the  trade,  that  it  might  turn  out 
wTell — would  you  not  think  yourself  mad  to  venture  upon  it  ?  Will 
you  put  your  chances  of  salvation  upon  a  still  greater  risk  V9  With 
these  words  he  wished  me  good  morning. 

A.  How  did  this  argument  affect  your  mind  ? 

Q.  You  will  wonder  at  me,  perhaps, — I  wonder  at  myself  when 
I  consider  how  very  consistent  and  plausible  it  seems — but  I  never 
felt  less  moved  by  any  words  in  my  life: — I  am  wrong — they  did 
produce  an  effect  upon  me — they  almost  counterbalanced  the  im- 
pression which  had  been  made  upon  my  mind  before,  in  favour  of 
your  Church  and  its  ordinances. 

A.  How  could  that  be  ? 

Q.  Reverence  was  what  I  looked  for  above  all  things  in  this 
clergyman.  He  had  talked  of  the  sin  of  irreverence  in  his  book, 
and  my  heart  had  felt  the  truth  of  his  words.  He  said  it  was  his 
reverence  which  hindered  him  from  speaking  to  me  on  the  subject 
of  his  faith.  And  yet  he  could  teach  me  to  calculate  about 
eternal  life  as  if  it  were  a  matter  of  merchandise  !  He  spoke  not 
to  that  in  me  which  was  looking  above  the  earth,  but  to  my  earthly 
selfish  nature,  not  to  that  in  me  which  was  ready  to  submit  to  any 
thing  or  bear  any  thing  for  the  sake  of  doing  God's  will  and  attain- 
ing a  knowledge  of  Him,  but  to  all  my  proud,  contentious,  disputa- 
tious feelings.  He  did  not  address  me  as  a  creature  capable  of 
reverence,  though  he  accused  me  of  irreverence ;  nay,  he  taught 
me  to  connect  a  lower,  more  grovelling,  notion  with  Christianity 
than  I  had  ever  done  while  under  the  most  irreverent  of  my 
teachers. 

A.  You  felt,  then,  that  you  should  be  more  right  in  continuing 
a  Quaker  ? 

Q.  No,  I  did  not  feel  that ;  my  mind  was  in  the  most  wretched 
contradiction.  But  I  said  to  myself,  I  am  urged  to  forsake  the  body 
in  which  I  have  lived,  and  my  fathers  have  lived  ;  I  am  to  turn  away 
from  those  who  first  taught  me  to  revere  the  operations  of  my 
own  spirit,  and  to  tremble  at  the  name  of  God ;  I  am  to  break  all 
the  bonds  of  old  affection  and  sympathy  :  and  why  ?  because  there 
are  higher  objects  and  interests  for  which  even  these  must  be  sacri- 


■ 


WITH  A  QUAKER. 


41 


ficed  ?  because  I  must  leave  father  and  mother  for  the  sake  of 
Christ  ?  no,  but  because  it  is  the  safer,  the  more  politic,  course  ; 
because  it  is  likely,  upon  a  balance  of  probabilities,  that  I  shall  be 
in  less  clanger  of  suffering  a  selfish  loss  here,  or  hereafter,  if  I  take 
it.  Magnify  the  loss  to  me  as  you  will ;  heap  up  the  epithets  in- 
finite, eternal,  as  you  may — this  is  a  question  of  principle,  not  of 
degree,  and  when  I  set  principle  at  nought,  I  believe  these  words, 
great  and  terrible  as  they  sound,  lose  all  their  meaning  to  me. 

A.  You  must  not  commit  the  unfairness  of  supposing  that  the 
clergyman  with  whom  you  spoke  really  attached  no  higher  and 
more  spiritual  idea  to  the  words  than  that  which  he  seems  to  have 
conveyed  to  you ;  he  probably  meant  to  use  an  argumentum  ad 
hominem. 

Q.  I  fully  understood  that.  The  conviction  I  formed  from  some 
parts  of  his  book  was,  and  still  is,  that  he  had  a  very  high  and 
spiritual  apprehension  of  things.  I  knew  he  would  think  me  unfit 
to  be  admitted  to  his  arcana,  nor  did  I  claim  such  an  honour.  But 
from  the  little  I  have  read  about  the  Catechumens  in  the  primitive 
Church,  I  fancied  that  they  were  not  taught  something  wholly  dif- 
ferent in  kind  from  that  which  they  learnt  after  their  baptism.*  I 
did  not  know  that  they  were  reasoned  with  upon  those  selfish  motives 
which  it  must  have  been  the  object  of  their  after  initiation  to  cure 
them  of.  But  be  that  as  it  may,  an  argumentum  ad  hominem  is 
meant,  I  suppose,  to  produce  conviction  of  some  kind  or  other  ;  else  it 
is  merely  a  gratuitous  insult  to  the  person  against  whom  it  is  directed. 
Now  I  cannot  conceive  any  one  on  whom  this  kind  of  argument 
would  produce  conviction.  It  assumes  him  to  whom  it  appeals  to 
care  fo:  nothing  but  profit  and  loss.  A  person  who  does  care 
for  nothing  but  profit  and  loss  would  merely  smile  at  the  attempt  to 
awaken  his  fears  about  an  unseen  and  future  blessing :  his  whole 
mind  is  wrapt  up  in  the  things  that  are  passing  around  him.  Your 
wisdom,  therefore,  consists  in  ignoring  the  existence  of  that  which 
might  listen  to  you,  and  in  addressing  yourself  to  that  which  has 
no  ears. 

A.  Well,  but  if  this  be  an  error,  it  is  not  peculiar  to  one  or  ano- 
ther school  among  us.  In  a  commercial  country  we  are  all  more 
or  less  inclined  to  act,  think,  and  argue  upon  such  maxims  as  these. 

*  See  note  (A). 


42 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 


Q.  I  do  not  think  the  clergyman  I  speak  of  would  be  very  grate- 
ful to  you  for  telling  him  he  had  adopted  his  notions  from  a  com- 
mercial age.  But  I  was  not  bringing  it  as  a  charge  against  a 
school, — I  was  only  telling  you  my  own  story. 

A.  It  is  a  sad  and  eventful  one— but  you  have  not  finished  it  ? 

Q.  The  next  incident  will  surprise  you  most  of  all.  I  have 
scarcely  courage  to  confess  that  during  the  last  two  months  I  have 
had  frequent  and  not  unpleasant  interviews  with  a  Romish  priest. 

A.  The  argument  about  safety  is  so  established  and  habitual  a 
one  among  the  members  of  his  church  that  I  think  he  cannot  have 
been  more  agreeable  to  you  than  the  English  clergyman. 

Q.  He  has  rarely,  if  ever,  resorted  to  it — possibly  he  may  have 
guessed  from  something  I  said  to  him  the  first  time  we  met,  that  it 
was  not  one  which  was  likely  to  have  any  great  weight  with  me. 
So  far  from  denouncing  any  of  my  former  thoughts  and  opinions, 
he  has  taken  pains  to  show  me  how  many  points  of  sympathy  there 
are  between  us. 

A.  Of  sympathy — between  a  Romanist  and  a  Quaker ! 

Q.  "  I  find,"  he  says, "  in  the  writings  of  the  early  Quakers,  the 
most  earnest  longings  after  a  universal  Church.  Is  it  wonderful 
that  they  should  have  felt  such  longings?  That  which  is  called 
the  English  Church — the  only  one  they  knew  of — is  limited  to  a 
particular  locality,  subjected  to  the  yoke  of  a  national  sovereign, 
tied  down  by  national  laws  and  customs.  Depend  upon  it,  my 
friend,  your  founders  were  right :  that  is  not  Christ's  Church  which 
is  not  universal." 

A.  How  did  you  answer  that  ? 

Q.  I  said  that  our  Quaker  system  was  by  its  very  nature  spi- 
ritual, and  that  his  Church  seemed  to  me  to  be  opposed  to 
spirituality.  "  Opposed  to  spirituality  !"  he  exclaimed  ;  "  and 
where  will  you  find  so  many  men  and  women  of  a  high  spirituality 
— so  many  men  and  women  who  resemble  your  own  in  their  love 
of  mystical  contemplation — as  among  us  ?  Has^  not  Thomas  a 
Kempis  been  always  a  favourite  with  your  friends  ?  And  is  not  the 
Imitation  of  Christ,  par  excellence,  the  book  of  Catholic  devotion  Vs 
"These,"  I  said,  "were  individuals — but  the  system?"  "  Well," 
he  continued  ;  "  the  system — look,  if  you  please,  at  that.  What  is 
your  great  complaint  against  the  English  system  ?    Is  it  not  that 


WITH  A  QUAKER. 


43 


the  mouths  of  men  are  shut  who  are  urged  by  the  Spirit  to  speak 
God's  word  ?  Can  you  bring  that  charge  against  us  ?  Look  at  our 
friars,  taken  from  the  humblest  classes,  recognised  the  moment 
they  discover  a  real  inward  vocation,  adopted  at  once  as  our 
teachers  though  they  have  no  one  worldly  qualification  to  recom- 
mend them.  Do  you  not  find  fault  with  your  English  authorities 
because  they  forbid  one  whole  sex  to  act  as  the  handmaids  of 
Christ  and  of  his  flock  ?  It  is  very  true  we  do  not  adopt  your 
notion  that  women  may  speak  in  the  Churches ;  we  adhere  more 
strictly  to  the  words  of  Scripture  than  to  suffer  such  a  practice :  but 
the  feeling  which  has  led  you  to  lift  your  voices  in  behalf  of  their 
rights  and  duties  meets  with  every  encouragement  among  us 
Catholics.  We  rejoice  to  see  women  devoting  themselves  to  the 
service  of  the  Church ;  we  bestow  upon  them  all  help  and  honour 
while  they  are  living :  we  account  them  saints  when  they  die." 
Another  point  of  agreement  he  discovered  between  us.  "  What 
is  the  great  moving  spring  and  centre  of  action  to  which  all  your 
writers  refer  ?  Surely  it  is  love.  They  believe  that  though  faith 
and  hope  be  great  Christian  graces,  the  greatest  of  all  is  Charity. 
That  is  the  very  principle  for  which  we  are  contending.  The  Pro- 
testants wish  to  substitute  faith  for  love.  WTe  say — as  your  friends 
have  also  said — that  we  will  not." 

A.  Do  you  find  that  these  arguments  have  brought  your  mind  to 
greater  quietness  and  satisfaction  ? 

Q.  Quietness  and  satisfaction!  The  words  seem  to  me  as  if 
they  were  spoken  in  a  dream.  No  indeed !  I  am  as  far  from 
quietness  and  satisfaction  as  any  poor  mortal  ever  was.  If  ever 
the  thought  of  joining  the  Romish  church  do  present  itself,  it  comes 
to  me  as  the  fearful  dream  of  something  to  which  I  may  be  driven 
— as  a  last  hopeless  alternative.  And  just  as  often  it  seems  to  me 
that  I  may  become  a  St.  Simonian  or  a  Socialist.  These  systems, 
too,  have  their  attractions  ;  they  address  themselves  to  wants  in  me 
which  I  think  must  be  satisfied — and  yet,  perhaps,  they  never  are 
satisfied.  Oftentimes  I  wish  above  all  things  for  a  potion  that 
would  put  me  to  sleep. 

A.  To  sleep,  my  friend, — perchance  to  dream. 

Q.  I  know  it  well ;  this  broken  fever-sleep  is  worse  than  being 
awake. 


44  INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 

A.  Need  I  now  answer  the  question  which  you  asked  me  at  the 
beginning  of  our  conversation — what  I  meant  by  wishing  you  to 
keep  your  Quaker  principles,  though  you  might  leave  the  Quaker 
society  ? 

Q.  Indeed  you  must ;  I  am  as  much  in  the  dark  about  the  pos- 
sibility of  such  a  distinction  as  ever. 

A.  Your  first  objection  to  Quakerism  arose  from  the  feeling  that 
it  was  not  acting  out  its  original  idea. 

Q.  And  my  second  from  the  feeling  that  that  idea  was  a  false 
one. 

A.  Let  us  consider.  Did  you  really  discover  that  idea  to  be  a 
false  one,  or  some  other  to  be  true  ? 

Q.  I  found,  or  thought  I  found,  certain  great  doctrines  laid  down 
in  Scripture, — doctrines  most  important  to  my  own  being — and  of 
these  the  early  Quakers  seemed  to  take  only  a  very  passing  notice, 
if  they  did  not  reject  them  altogether. 

A.  I  do  not  doubt  that  you  discovered  these  doctrines  in  Scrip- 
ture, or  that  you  found  them  practically  important,  or  that  the  early 
Quakers  comparatively  neglected  them.  What  I  doubt  is,  whether 
you  ascertained  those  doctrines  of  which  the  Quakers  did  take 
notice  to  be  unimportant,  unscriptural,  or  inconsistent  with  the 
others. 

Q.  I  certainly  thought  they  were. 

A.  Yes,  and  to  that  judgment  of  yours,  formed,  perhaps,  upon 
very  hasty  and  insufficient  evidence,  you  attached  the  same  sacred- 
ness  as  to  the  witness  of  your  heart  and  conscience,  and  of  Scrip- 
ture with  your  heart  and  conscience,  that  those  doctrines  of  which 
your  evangelical  friends  spoke  were  needful  to  you. 

Q.  Is  that  a  practical  distinction  ? 

A.  It  is  one  which  you  have  yourself  recognised  in  the  most 
emphatic  manner.  Did  not  you  say  that  while  the  dissenting 
minister  and  the  evangelical  clergyman  were  maintaining  their 
own  positions,  they  made  the  deepest  impression  upon  you  ?  And 
did  not  you  say  that  when  they  began  to  ridicule  the  mystical 
opinions,  they  created  the  most  vehement  reaction  in  your  mind 
against  that  which  you  had  been  previously  inclined  to  adopt  ? 

Q.  I  certainly  said  so. 

A.  Well !  and  in  that  confession,  I  think  I  can  find  an  explana- 


% 

WITH  A  QUAKER.  45 

tion  of  all  your  subsequent  experience.  You  parted  too  suddenly 
with  something  which  God  meant  you  to  keep,  and  all  the  bewil- 
derment and  restlessness  you  have  since  suffered  has  been  the 
necessary  and  appointed  punishment  of  that  error. 

Q.  If  it  be  so,  it  is  an  error  which  I  cannot  retrieve.  The  Evan- 
gelical, the  Unitarian,  the  English  clergyman,  the  Romanist,  may 
have  left  me  nothing  to  fill  the  void  in  my  mind,  but  they  have 
effectually  despoiled  me  of  what  was  there  before.  They  have  not 
convinced  me  that  there  is  a  standing-place  in  any  of  their  systems, 
but  they  have  made  me  certain  that  I  have  none  in  my  own. 

A.  Alas  !  it  is  thus  that  men — benevolent  men — honest  men  — 
holy  men,  trifle  with  that  which  is  most  awful  and  sacred  in  the 
minds  of  their  brethren !  But  they  suffer  as  much  evil  as  they 
inflict. 

Q.  In  what  wray  ? 

A.  They  turn  the  truths  which  they  hold  in  their  inmost  hearts, 
and  which  God  has  given  them  to  defend,  into  negations  and  con- 
tradictions; they  oblige  themselves  to  resort  to  insufficient  proofs 
and  false  assumptions  in  support  of  these  truths,  because  they  have 
wilfully  rejected  the  evidence  of  them  which  God  was  supplying  in 
the  wants  and  cravings  of  their  fellow  men  ;  they  encourage  infi- 
delity under  the  name  of  faith ;  they  form  parties  when  they  mean 
to  proclaim  principles  which  would  make  parties  impossible  ;  they 
set  up  theories  and  systems  based  upon  private  judgments  and 
individual  conceits,  wThen  they  are  professing  by  someway  or  other 
to  lead  us  on  to  permanent  truths  which  belong  to  all  and  are 
necessary  for  all ;  they  create  new  divisions  by  the  very  efforts 
which  they  make  to  promote  unity ;  they  invent  lines  and  land- 
marks of  their  own,  but  the  grand  everlasting  distinctions  which 
God  has  established  escape  them  altogether. 

Q.  But  why  declaim  against  an  evil  which  seems  so  deeply 
rooted  in  human  nature,  that  the  efforts  of  six  thousand  years  to 
eradicate  it  have  proved  abortive  ? 

A.  Why,  indeed  ;  if  I  did  not  believe  that  God  had  provided  a 
complete  and  effectual  witness  against  this  evil,  which  is,  as  you 
say,  so  rooted  in  our  selfish  natures ;  if  I  did  not  see  that  this  wit- 
ness had  prevailed  to  make  itself  heard  in  every  age  above  all  the 
clamours  and  distractions  which  were  seeking  to  drown  its  voice ;  if 


46 


INTRODUCTORY  DIALOGUE 


I  were  not  convinced  that  the  world  would  have  been  torn  in  pieces 
by  its  individual  factions,  if  there  had  not  been  this  bond  of  peace 
and  fellowship  in  the  midst  of  it;  if  I  were  not  sure  that  peace  is 
meant  to  drive  out  war,  good  evil,  light  darkness;  if  I  could  not 
recognise  more  abundant  proofs  of  this  glorious  fact  in  our  own 
day  than  in  any  previous  one;  if  it  did  ^not  seem  to  me  that  all 
sects  and  factions,  religious,  political,  or  philosophical,  were  bear- 
ing testimonies,  sometimes  mute,  sometimes  noisy,  occasionally 
hopeful,  oftener  reluctant,  to  the  presence  of  that  Church  Universal, 
which  is  at  once  to  justify  their  truths,  explain  the  causes  of  their 
opposition,  and  destroy  their  existence. 

Q.  But  the  difficulty  is  that  these  factions  have  been  in  the 
Church  Universal  itself — assign  whatever  meaning  you  please  to 
that  phrase. 

A.  That  is  just  the  very  point  I  was  asserting.  I  said  there  was 
a  sect  spirit,  a  spirit  which  laboured  to  set  up  individual  whims, 
opinions,  and  judgments  in  each  of  us;  in  us  of  the  English 
Church,  as  well  as  in  the  Romanist,  the  foreign  Protestant,  the 
Quaker,  the  Evangelical  Dissenter,  or  the  Unitarian.  The  ques- 
tion is  whether  we  do  not  all  in  our  hearts  and  consciences  feel  and 
know  that  this  sect  spirit  is  a  vile,  accursed,  devilish  spirit ;  whether, 
if  we  do  know  this,  these  same  hearts  and  consciences  do  not  testify 
that  it  is  not  meant  to  rule  the  world ;  whether,  if  that  testimony 
be  true,  we  are  not  bound  to  inquire  what  is  to  rule  the  world 
instead  of  it. 

Q.  And  that  inquiry  you  think  I  may  even  yet  enter  upon  with 

some  hope  ? 

A.  The  early  Quakers  testified  that  there  was  a  Kingdom  of 
Christ  in  the  world,  and  that  it  would  subdue  all  kingdoms  to 
itself.  Are  you  willing  to  inquire  with  me  into  the  grounds  upon 
which  they  made  this  assertion  ;  to  consider  whether  those  grounds 
be  tenable ;  and  whether  the  Quaker  system  be  or  be  not  the 
realization  of  the  Quaker  idea  ?  Shall  we  then  inquire  into  the 
principles  of  those  religious  bodies  who  wish  you  to  reject  Quaker- 
ism ;  asking  whether  these  also  may  not  be  sound  and  true,  and 
whether  they  have  not  been  depraved  and  degraded  by  certain 
negative  notions  to  which  they  have  been  appended  ;  whether  the 
systems  which  have  been  invented  to  express  them,  do  really 


WITH  A  QUAKER. 


47 


express  them  or  no  ?  Supposing  our  conclusions  on  this  last  point 
should  not  be  satisfactory,  shall  we  then  proceed  to  consider  the 
assertion  of  the  Romanist — that  there  is  a  Catholic  Church  which 
existed  before  all  these  systems,  and  which  is  derived  from  a  higher 
authority  than  all  of  them  ?  If  he  should  be  able  to  make  this 
assertion  good,  we  may  then  inquire  whether  the  Romish  system 
be  this  Church  or  the  disease  of  it  j  whether  that  system  have 
exalted  the  ordinances  of  the  Church  which  its  supporters  acknow- 
ledge and  revere,  or  have  degraded  them  and  deprived  them  of 
their  significance  ;  whether  this  Church  Catholic  be  in  contradiction 
to  those  ideas  which  the  Quakers  and  the  other  Protestant  bodies 
hold,  or  whether  it  be  the  legitimate  and  perfect  realization  of 
them.  We  cannot  complete  this  investigation  without  examining 
that  point  upon  which  your  Romanist  friend  discovered  so  close  a 
resemblance  between  your  views  and  his ;  the  point,  I  mean, 
whether  a  national  society  and  a  universal  society  be  in  their 
natures  contradictory  and  incompatible  ;  or  whether  they  have 
been  only  made  so  by  certain  notions  which  interfere  with  the 
universality  of  the  spiritual  body  as  well  as  with  the  distinctness 
of  the  national  body.  When  we  have  arrived  at  some  conclusion 
upon  this  matter,  we  shall  be  in  a  condition  to  speak  of  our  position 
in  England;  to  inquire  if  there  be  a  Catholic  Church  here  or  not, 
and  if  there  be,  under  what  circumstances  it  exists,  what  are  its 
dangers  and  evils,  whether  these  dangers  and  evils  are  reasons  for 
our  living  in  separation  from  it  or  for  uniting  ourselves  more 
closely  to  it. 

Q.  I  am  ready  to  hear  what  you  have  to  say  on  these  subjects, 
though  I  cannot  pretend  that  I  look  for  any  great  discoveries. 

A.  I  rejoice  that  you  do  not.  If  we  begin  with  the  expectation 
of  great  results  our  pride  will  be  rewarded  with  disappointment, 
and  we  shall  add  one  more  scheme  to  those  which  were  so  fair  in 
appearance,  and  which  have  proved  so  abortive  :  if  we  desire  to 
walk  humbly  along  the  path  which  God  has  marked  out  for  us, 
rejecting  no  light,  however  feeble,  which  He  vouchsafes,  and 
trusting  in  Him  to  guide  us  to  the  perfect  day,  I  do  not  think  that 
his  promise  to  wayfaring  men  will  be  unfulfilled  to  us. 


PART  I. 


ON  THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  THE   QUAKERS  AND  OF  THE   OTHER  RELIGIOUS 

BODIES    WHICH    HAVE    ARISEN    SINCE    THE    REFORMATION  AND  OF 

THE  SYSTEMS  TO  WHICH  THEY  HAVE  GIVEN  BIRTH. 

CHAPTER  I. 

QUAKERISM. 


SECTION  L 

ON  THE  POSITIVE  DOCTRINES  OF  THE  QUAKERS. 
The  Indwelling  Word — The  Spiritual  Kingdom — Spiritual  Influences. 

In  Mr.  Gurney's  work  on  the  religious  peculiarities  of  the 
Society  of  Friends,  we  are  told  that  the  doctrine,  "  which  lies  at 
the  root  of  all  their  particular  views  and  practices,  is  that  of  the 
perceptible  influence  and  guidance  of  the  Spirit  of  truth."  This 
author  maintains  in  a  previous  passage  that  "  a  measure  of  the 
influence  of  the  Spirit  is  bestowed  upon  all  men  whereby  they  are 
enlightened,  and  may  be  saved."  But  it  is  obvious  that  he  does 
not  look  upon  this  principle  as  in  any  degree  so  important  or  so 
characteristic  of  the  Quakers,  as  the  other.  I  do  not  see  how  a 
mere  theory  respecting  the  condition  of  the  world  generally  can 
ever  seem  so  important  to  any  man,  as  a  principle  which  concerns 
his  own  conduct  and  responsibility.  But  I  question  whether  the 
older  Quakers  would  have  stated  the  latter  doctrine  precisely  in 
the  terms  which  Mr.  Gurney  has  used  ;  I  think  they  would  have 
given  it  a  much  more  practical  form  and  signification,  and  that  by 
doing  so  they  would  have  exhibited  the  relative  position  and  value 
of  these  two  portions  of  their  creed  very  differently. 

Any  one  who  reads  Fox's  Journal  will  find  that  he  adhered 
most  literally  and  practically  to  a  belief  in  perceptible  impressions 
and  influences.  His  whole  conduct  was  regulated  by  the  conviction, 
that  he  was  commanded  to  do  certain  acts  and  utter  certain  words  ; 


ON  THE  POSITIVE  DOCTRINES  OF  THE  QUAKERS.  49 

wherever  he  went,  whomsoever  he  denounced,  whatever  tone  or 
manner  he  gave  to  his  discourses,  he  believed  undoubtedly  that  he 
was  obeying  a  divine  instigation.  But,  however  strange  this 
conviction  may  seem  in  our  days,  (and  some  of  the  results  of  it 
would  seem  strange  to  the  Quakers  themselves,)  no  one  who  is  at 
all  acquainted  with  the  history  of  the  period  between  1645  and 
1660  will  fancy  that  Fox  or  his  disciples  were  in  this  particular 
distinguished  from  a  number  of  other  religious  men.  There  were 
hundreds,  perhaps  I  might  say  thousands,  in  Cromwell's  army  who 
lived  and  acted  as  much  under  this  belief,  and  who  followed  it  out 
as  consistently,  as  any  Quaker  could  possibly  do.  Fox  himself  was 
frequently  brought  into  collision  with  such  men.  He  speaks,  again 
and  again,  of  a  body  of  Ranters  who  gave  him  much  trouble,  on 
this  very  ground  that  they  all  believed  themselves  under  perceptible 
spiritual  influences.  And  in  one  very  remarkable  passage  of  his 
Diary,  he  says  that  a  convert  of  his,  Justice  Hotham,  told  him, 
that  he  (Fox)  had  been  raised  up  to  utter  a  principle  which 
discomfited  these  Ranters,  and  that  but  for  this  principle  they 
would  have  overrun  the  whole  land  and  destroyed  it. 

I.  This  principle,  and  not  the  doctrine  respecting  perceptible 
influences,  must  then,  one  would  think,  have  been  the  central  one 
of  Primitive  Quakerism.  Nay,  a  really  earnest  Quaker  would 
have  been  willing  that  the  truth  and  value  of  his  spiritual  impres- 
sions should  be  tried  by  their  conformity  to  it  or  disagreement  with 
it.*  What  then  was  this  principle  ?  William  Penn  in  his  preface 
to  Fox's  Journal  expresses  it  in  the  following  words.  "  They  were 
directed  to  the  light  of  Jesus  Christ  within  them  as  the  seed  and 
leaven  of  the  kingdom  of  God ;  near  all,  because  in  all,  and  God's 
talent  to  all.  A  faithful  and  true  witness  and  just  monitor  in  every 
bosom,  the  gift  and  grace  of  God  to  life  and  salvation,  that  appears 
to  all,  though  few  regard  it."  (Page  ix.)  This,  he  says,  (page 
xix.)  was  "  their  fundamental  principle,  the  corner-stone  of  their 
fabric,  and,  to  speak  eminently  and  properly,  their  characteristic 

*  In  one  case,  this  remark  was  strikingly  verified.  James  Naylor,  whose  strange 
doings  at  Bristol  are  recorded  in  our  ordinary  English  histories,  acknowledged  that  he 
had  been  deceived  by  a  false  spirit  or  by  the  fleshly  workings  of  his  own  mind.  Yet 
he  proclaimed  his  faith  in  Fox's  principle  to  the  last,  and  looked  upon  his  errors  as 
the  consequence  of  a  departure  from  it. 

4 


50 


ON  THE  POSITIVE  DOCTRINES 


or  main  distinguishing  point  or  principle  this  principle  of  "  the 
light  of  Christ  within,  as  God's  gift  for  man's  salvation,  is  the  root 
of  the  goodly  tree  of  doctrines,  that  grew  and  branched  out  of  it." 

That  this  doctrine  was  the  ground  of  Fox's  teaching  every  page 
of  his  Diary  proves.  It  might  be  a  conviction,  that  he  was  sensibly 
led  by  the  Spirit,  which  induced  him  to  break  forth  in  this  or  that 
steeple-house,  or  to  attack  this  or  that  Independent,  Baptist,  Pres- 
byterian, or  "  Common-Prayer  man."  But,  when  he  did  speak, 
thewords  he  uttered  were,  "  Brother,  there  is  a  Tight  within  thee : 
resist  it  and  thou  art  miserable ;  follow  it  and  thou  art  happy." 
And  he  again  and  again  expresses  his  assurance  that  these  were 
the  words  which  produced  a  real  moral  effect  upon  his  hearers ; 
that  whatever  else  he  said  was  valuable  only  as  it  arose  out  of 
them,  or  tended  to  illustrate  and  enforce  them.  He  believes  that 
he  spoke  to  something  which  was  in  those  to  whom  he  spoke,  and 
that,  being  there,  it  answered  his  appeal. 

It  was  not  from  the  teachers  or  popular  books  of  the  day  that  Fox 
learnt  this  doctrine.  The  language  in  which  he  describes  his  early  life 
is  remarkably  unlike  that  which  we  meet  with  in  Puritan  biographies. 
"  At  eleven  years  of  age,"  he  says,  "  he  knew  pureness  and  right- 
eousness ;"*  while  he  was  a  child  he  was  taught  to  walk  to  be  kept 
pure  ;  when  he  grew  up,  and  "  was  put  to  a  man  that  was  a  shoe- 
maker by  trade,  and  that  dealt  in  wool,  and  used  grazing,  and  sold 
cattle,  and  a  great  deal  passed  through  his  hands,  he  never  wronged 
man  or  woman,  for  the  Lord's  power  was  over  him  to  preserve 
him  .  .  .  people  had  generally  a  love  to  him  for  his  honesty  and 
innocency."  The  conflicts  of  mind,  which  he  describes  afterwards, 
had  no  relation  to  any  of  the  controversies,  religious  or  political, 
by  which  England  was  then  torn  asunder.  Of  Prelacy  or  Covenant, 
King  or  Parliament,  he  knew  nothing.  The  awful  question,  What 
am  1 1 — what  have  I  to  do  in  this  strange  confused  world  ?  occu- 
pied his  soul.  It  is  one  which  must  be  new  to  each  man,  though 
thousands  may  have  been  vexed  with  it  before  him.  Those  whom 
Fox  consulted  about  it  afforded  him  little  help ;  he  withdrew 
from  the  society  of  his  fellow-creatures,  and  studied  his  Bible. 
Even  that  seemed  not  to  tell  him  the  secret  which  he  wanted  to 


*  Journal,  page  76. 


OF  THE  QUAKERS. 


51 


know  :  one  thing  however  he  learnt ;  there  was  in  him  that  which 
shrank  from  this  inquiry,  and  would  fain  forget  it  altogether,  and 
there  was  that  in  him  which  would  have  no  rest  till  he  found  the 
answer  to  it.  Now,  was  not  this  in  itself  a  great  discovery  ?  Did 
it  not  show  him  (in  part  at  least)  what  kind  of  being  he  was  1 
He  had  desires  which  drew  him  down  to  things  which  he  saw,  and 
tasted,  and  handled ;  he  had  desires  which  aspired  after  something 
with  which  his  senses  and  appetites  had  nothing  to  do.  And  was 
there  not  another  discovery  contained  in  this  ?  They  were  actual 
earthly  objects  which  attracted  him  towards  themselves  ;  his  nature 
inclined  him  to  them,  yet,  when  he  obeyed  that  nature,  he  seemed 
to  lose  what  was  most  real  in  him.  Must  there  not  be  a  counter- 
attraction,  a  power  as  real  as  any  of  those  things  which  he  beheld, 
raising  him  out  of  them,  urging  him  to  seek  something  above  him- 
self, a  real  substantial  good  ?  Must  not  that  power  be  in  truth 
greater,  though  the  contrary  might  seem  to  be  the  case,  than  all 
which  were  resisting  it  ?  Could  he  not  obey  that  higher  influence, 
and,  by  obeying  it,  obtain  life  and  peace  ?  He  felt  that  he  could  ; 
that  he  was  meant  to  do  so.  The  light  was  stronger  than  the 
darkness.    He  was  privileged  to  dwell  in  it. 

But  was  this  light,  then,  afforded  only  to  George  Fox  the  shoe- 
maker ?  How  could  this  be  1  Did  it  not  witness  to  him,  that 
whenever  he  was  setting  up  himself  he  was  resisting  it,  not  follow- 
ing it  ?  When  he  was  obeying  his  selfish  inclinations,  he  knew  that 
he  was  flying  from  this  great  teacher ;  when  he  desired  to  be  led 
by  it,  he  knew  that  he  was  a  man.  Surely,  then,  this  must  be  a 
light  vouchsafed  to  him,  because  he  was  a  man ;  it  must  be  "  a 
light  which  lighteneth  every  man  who  cometh  into  the  world."  A 
terrible  majority  might  be  striving  against  it,  but  their  very  stri- 
vings proclaimed  the  truth  ;  the  kind  of  misery  which  men  experi- 
enced showed  the  happiness  which  was  intended  for  them. 

When  we  had  arrived  at  this  conviction,  the  Bible  seemed  to 
him  a  new  book  altogether.  From  first  to  last  it  witnessed  to  him 
of  that  invisible  good  which  men  are  to  seek  after,  and  against  the 
visible  idolatries  which  are  drawing  them  away  from  it.  The  lives 
of  the  patriarchs,  of  Moses,  of  the  prophets,  were  the  lives  of  men 
who  were  following  the  light,  the  teacher  of  their  hearts,  the  Lord 
of  righteousness,  and  were  resisting  the  evil  inclinations  and  appe- 


52  ON  THE  POSITIVE  DOCTRINES 

tites  which  would  make  them  the  slaves  and  worshippers  of  out- 
ward things.  On  the  other  hand,  all  the  records  of  the  sins  of  the 
Jewish  nation,  or  of  heathen  nations,  were  records  of  revolts  from 
this  mysterious  guide  and  teacher,  by  men  who  chose  darkness 
rather  than  light,  the  outward  and  apparent  good  rather  than  the 
real  and  inward.  As  might  be  expected,  the  darkness  became 
continually  more  gross  in  each  individual  who  gave  himself  up  to 
it,  and  the  light  brighter  and  clearer  in  each  one  who  steadily  pur- 
sued it.  And  so  it  had  been  in  each  new  period — greater  blindness 
and  sensuality,  greater  and  more  immediate  illumination  ;  Jews  and 
Gentiles  becoming  more  estranged  from  Him  who  was  yet  reveal- 
ing Himself  to  them  both  ;  holy  prophets  holding  more  wonderful 
converse  than  their  fathers  had  done  with  the  Word  of  God — 
rising  more  above  outward  emblems  and  institutions,  obeying  more 
implicitly  his  inwTard  suggestions.  Such,  or  nearly  such,  was  the 
form  in  which  the  Old  Testament  history  seems  to  have  presented 
itself  to  Fox ;  and  therefore  the  wTords  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Gospel  of  St.  John  appeared  to  him  to  stand  in  the  most  natural 
connection  with  all  the  records  to  which  they  refer.  And  St.  Paul's 
declarations,  in  the  first  and  second  of  Romans,  that  the  Gentiles 
knew  God,  but  glorified  Him  not  as  God,  and  liked  not  to  retain 
him  in  their  knowledge;  and  that  the  Gentiles  as  well  as  the 
Jews,  if  they  sought  for  glory,  and  honour,  and  immortality,  would 
obtain  eternal  life ;  while  the  Jews  as  well  as  the  Gentiles,  if  they 
were  contentious  and  obeyed  not  the  truth  but  obeyed  unrighteous- 
ness, would  have  tribulation  and  wTrath, — far  from  containing  a 
puzzle,  which  it  required  critical  ingenuity  to  surmount,  appeared 
to  him  the  simple  announcement  of  a  truth  with  which  all  the  rest 
of  Scripture  was  in  agreement. 

II.  But  how  was  the  condition  of  men  affected  by  the  appear- 
ance of  our  Lord  in  human  flesh  1  This  was  a  question  which 
probably  did  not  at  first  present  itself  to  Fox ;  but  by  degrees  he 
and  the  other  Quakers  found  an  answer  to  it.  Men  having  fore- 
gone their  spiritual  privileges  and  given  themselves  up  to  the  flesh, 
were  not  indeed  forsaken  by  their  heavenly  Teacher,  but  they  could 
not  be  treated  as  spiritual.  By  outward  emblems  and  images,  the 
elements  of  the  world,  they  were  trained  :  to  the  Jews  was  given 
a  direct  intimation  of  the  nature  and  purpose  of  their  discipline  ; 


OF  THE  QUAKERS. 


53 


the  Gentiles,  through  a  thicker  film  of  sense,  and  with  fewer  helps 
to  penetrate  it,  might  yet,  if  they  would,  discover  their  invisible 
guide.  But  these  were  preparations  for  a  clearer  day.  Christ, 
the  Living  Word,  the  Universal  Light,  appeared  to  men,  and 
showed  in  his  own  person  what  processes  He  was  carrying  on  in 
the  hearts  of  all ;  subduing  the  flesh,  keeping  Himself  separate 
from  the  world,  submitting  to  death.  This  manifestation  was  the 
signal  for  the  commencement  of  a  new  dispensation ;  sensible 
emblems  were  no  longer  to  intercept  man's  view  of  his  Lord  ; 
national  distinctions  were  to  be  abolished  ;  men  might  be  treated 
as  belonging  to  a  higher  state  than  that  which  they  lost  in  Adam; 
they  might  attain  a  perfection  which  did  not  exist  in  Adam. 

The  Scriptural  testimonies  to  this  doctrine  seemed  to  them  most 
numerous.  Stripped  of  the  fantastical  covering  in  which  they 
were  sometimes  enveloped,  few  readers  will  think  that  they  re- 
ceived a  forced  or  unnatural  construction.  The  announcement  by 
the  Prophets  of  a  dispensation  which  should  have  these  two  cha- 
racteristics above  all  others — spirituality  and  universality ;  the 
evident  annulling,  in  the  sermon  on  the  Mount,  of  rules  and 
maxims  which  had  been  previously  current  and  the  substitution  of 
a  spiritual  principle  for  them  ;  our  Lord's  constant  declaration  that 
He  came  to  establish  a  kingdom,  and  that  that  kingdom  was  to  be 
within  us;  the  announcement  of  the  Evangelists  that  his  parables 
were  the  discovery  of  mysteries  which  had  been  hidden  from  the 
foundation  of  the  world ;  his  own  words  that  He  would  yet  show 
his  disciples  more  plainly  of  the  Father;  the  language  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  affirming  that  a  spiritual  covenant  had 
succeeded  to  the  formal  Jewish  covenant ;  the  language  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  affirming  that  an  economy  hidden  from 
ages  and  generations  was  then  made  known  to  his  Holy  Apostles 
by  the  Spirit ;  the  exhortations  in  the  Philippians  and  the  Hebrews 
to  press  onw7ards  to  perfection — exhortations  evidently  grounded 
upon  the  new  position  into  which  those  who  were  addressed  had 
been  brought:  these  are  only  specimens  of  the  evidence  which 
every  page  of  the  New  Testament  seemed  to  the  Quakers  to  con- 
tain of  the  doctrine  that  our  Lord  came  to  bring  in  a  universal 
Light,  to  establish  a  perfectly  spiritual  Kingdom,  and  to  encourage 
men  to  seek  a  perfectly  spiritual  Life. 


54 


OBJECTIONS  TO 


III.  It  is  implied,  in  the  very  idea  of  this  constitution,  that  men 
are  brought  under  a  directly  divine  government  or  influence.  Those 
who  yield  themselves  to  the  light,  and  become  members  of  the 
spiritual  kingdom,  recognise  this  influence  in  all  their  acts.  They 
will  not  move  without  it ;  they  will  be  ready  to  move  anywhere 
at  its  bidding.  The  sacrifice  of  all  personal  inclinations,  energies, 
will,  in  short,  self-annihilation  in  its  highest  form,  is  their  duty  and 
their  privilege ;  so  they  become  fit  to  utter  the  divine  voice,  and 
prompt  to  perform  the  divine  will. 

In  support  of  this  doctrine  the  Quakers  would  plead  the  words 
of  John  the  Baptist,  announcing  the  baptism  of  the  Holy  Spirit  and 
fire  as  the  great  promise  of  the  new  covenant ;  the  ignorance  of 
the  Apostles  till  they  received  the  gift  from  on  high ;  the  silence 
and  waiting  that  were  enjoined  upon  them  till  it  arrived  ;  the 
whole  tenor  of  the  Apostolic  history,  showing  that  the  first  minis- 
ters of  Christ  believed  themselves  to  be  acting  under  an  immediate 
inspiration,  and  to  be  incapable  of  acting  without  it ;  the  principle 
so  often  asserted,  and  everywhere  implied,  that  the  kingdom  was 
to  be  everlasting,  and  that  those  who  first  witnessed  its  establish- 
ment  were  to  be  patterns  and  precedents  of  all  who  succeeded  them. 


SECTION  II. 

OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  QUAKER  THEOLOGY  CONSIDERED. 

I  am  far  from  saying  that  the  early  Quakers  acknowledged  no 
theological  principles  except  these  three.  In  a  sense  they  admitted 
most  of  the  doctrines  which  other  men  embody  in  creeds  or  articles. 
But  these  three  principles  determined  that  sense  ;  these  had  been 
realized  in  their  minds ;  the  rest  hung  loosely  about  them,  and  at 
one  time  might  be  heartily  recognised,  at  one  time  almost  rejected? 
as  they  seemed  to  square  with  the  primary  truths  or  to  contradict 
them.  These  three  doctrines,  then,  may  be  said  to  constitute  the 
positive  theology  of  the  Quakers  ;  from  these  their  system  has  been 
deduced.  Before  I  inquire  what  that  system  is,  and  how  far  it  is 
legitimately  connected  with  the  principles  of  which  I  have  spoken 
I  may  state  in  a  few  words  why  I  cannot  join  some  conspicuous 
opponents  of  Quakerism  in  denouncing  these  principles — why  I 


THE  QUAKER  THEOLOGY  CONSIDERED. 


55 


believe  them  to  be  either  truths  or  hints  of  truths  which  are  most 
vital  and  important. 

I.  There  are  three  objections  usually  taken  against  Fox's  doc- 
trine of  the  Inward  Light  or  the  Indwelling  Word.  First,  it  is 
said  to  be  mystical ;  secondly,  it  is  said  to  be  unscriptural ;  thirdly 
it  is  said  to  be  unsupported  by  fact,  or  by  any  authority,  save  that 
of  an  ignorant  mechanic  and  his  credulous  disciples. 

1.  I  shall  not  evade  the  first  charge,  by  saying  that  the  word 
mystical  may  mean  any  thing,  every  thing,  or  nothing;  that  it  may 
be  applied — has  been  applied — against  the  most  recognised  prin- 
ciples in  physics  as  well  as  in  morals ;  that  if  mystical  and  myste- 
rious mean  the  same  thing,  all  science  is  mystical.  I  will  at  once 
give  the  word  a  sense  which  may  be  a  legitimate  sense,  which  at 
all  events  is  a  common  one,  and  which  I  am  convinced  is  an  evil 
one.  The  tendency  to  invest  certain  feelings,  consciousnesses, 
temperaments  of  individual  men  with  the  sacredness  which  belongs 
only  to  such  truths  as  are  of  universal  character,  and  may  be 
brought  to  a  universal  test,  is  often  designated  by  the  name  Mys- 
ticism ;  it  is  unquestionably  one  to  which  religious  men  in  all  ages 
have  been  prone ;  and  I  do  not  know  any  records  wThich  contain 
more  frequent  instances  of  it  than  those  of  the  early  Quakers.  But 
the  question  is,  whether,  if  this  be  the  definition  of  mysticism — and 
I  know  no  definition  which  distinctly  condemns  it  except  this — the 
doctrine  we  are  considering  be  not  essentially  unmystical,  nay, 
whether  we  might  not  almost  venture  to  call  it  emphatically  the 
antagonist  principle  to  mysticism.  For  surely  it  disclaims,  more 
vehemently  than  almost  any,  exclusive  appropriation  ;  it  submits 
itself  more  directly  than  most  to  a  universal  test.  Fox  did  not  say, 
"  This  light  is  mine  ;"  he  said,  "  It  is  yours  as  much  as  mine :  it  is 
with  you  ;  and  in  the  healthiest,  truest,  soberest,  states  of  your 
mind,  you  know  that  it  is  with  you."  This  principle  stood  out, 
then,  in  marked  contrast  to  those  peculiar  experiences  and  inter- 
pretations upon  which  he  often  laid  so  much  stress ;  attesting  its 
difference  from  them  by  the  effects  which  it  produced,  and  obtain- 
ing at  least  some  sanction  in  its  favour  from  the  circumstance  of  its 
being  forced  upon  the  conviction  of  men  whose  characteristic  in- 
firmities would  have  led  them  to  an  entirely  different  conclusion. 

2.  The  notion  that  the  doctrine  is  unscriptural  has  derived 


56 


OBJECTIONS  TO 


support,  partly  from  the  opinion  that  Fox  and  his  followers  habit- 
ually disparaged  the  Scriptures,  partly  from  his  own  confession  that 
he  knew  the  doctrine  before  he  saw  it  in  the  Bible,  though  after- 
wards he  learnt  how  to  support  it  from  the  Bible.  How  far  the 
general  charge  against  them  is  true  I  may  consider  presently ;  that 
it  does  not  affect  this  particular  case  is  evident  from  the  appeal 
which  they  make,  not  to  a  few  isolated  texts  merely,  but  to  the 
whole  tenor  and  context  of  the  inspired  volume  in  defence  of  their 
position.  Neither  can  I  see  in  Fox's  account  of  the  mode  by  which 
he  arrived  at  an  apprehension  of  this  principle  any  thing  different 
from  the  statements  which  are  common  in  writers  who  are  the 
most  opposed  to  him ;  that,  after  they  were  spiritually  awakened, 
the  Bible,  which  had  been  a  dead  letter  to  them,  seemed  to  be  full 
of  meaning  to  them,  the  only  wonder  being  that  they  had  not  per- 
ceived it  before — language  which  I  believe  is  very  simple,  reason- 
able, and  accordant  with  the  experience  of  most  earnest  men,  no 
wise  derogatory  to  the  Bible,  and  not  at  all  incompatible  with  the 
belief  that  the  study  of  it  may  have  been  one  of  the  principal  in- 
struments whereby  that  capacity  which  makes  its  words  compre- 
hensible was  called  forth.  And  surely  no  considerations  about  the 
course  of  thought  which  another  man  has  followed,  need  hinder  us 
from  inquiring  whether  the  views  which  he  takes  of  a  book  do 
throw  a  light  upon  it,  and  render  the  contents  of  it  more  coherent 
and  intelligible.  I  have  stated  a  few  of  the  reasons  which  have 
led  others,  and,  I  acknowledge,  compel  me  to  believe  that  the 
denial  of  Fox's  doctrine  makes  the  scheme,  the  spirit,  and  the  letter 
of  Scripture  alike  perplexing.  If  it  were  necessary  to  add  further . 
proofs,  I  should  find  them  in  the  violent  and  tortuous  expedients 
to  wThich  critics  have  resorted  for  the  sake,  as  they  profess,  of 
escaping  from  the  extravagances  and  absurdities  of  mystical 
interpretation.  When,  for  instance,*  I  hear  a  grave,  learned, 
and  (so  far  as  hostility  to  Socinianism  is  a  title  to  that  name) 
orthodox  interpreter,  suggesting  that  6  loyog  in  the  first  verse  of 
the  Gospel  of  St.  John  means  only  6  XeyofiEvog,  (the  person  talked 
of — promised,)  supporting  the  gloss  by  the  question  of  John's  dis- 
ciples, 2v  tl  6  tQ%6[itrog ;  and  treating  the  two  phrases  as  equiva- 
lent ;  when  I  find  such  an  opinion  as  this  adopted  by  respectable 

*  See  Note  (B). 


THE  QUAKER  THEOLOGY  CONSIDERED. 


57 


scholars,  as  a  convenient  refuge  from  mysticism — I  am  constrained 
to  think  that  I  am  not  likely  to  preserve  my  respect  for  the  letter 
of  the  inspired  volume  more  uncorrupted,  or  my  apprehension  of 
what  is  reasonable  in  human  language  more  clear,  by  determining 
not  to  believe  that  the  Word  of  God  before  He  came  in  the  flesh 
was  the  light  which  lightened  all  men — a  principle  as  much  con- 
firmed to  me  by  the  evidence  of  profane  as  of  Sacred  History. 

3.  I  speak  of  this  evidence,  for  I  believe  that  the  third  objec- 
tion to  this  doctrine  is  quite  as  untenable  as  the  other  two.  It  has 
been  said,  and  I  think  justly,  that  if  Fox's  assertion  respecting  the 
light  which  the  heathens  possessed  were  well  founded,  there  would 
be  very  clear  indications  of  the  fact  in  the  records  of  their  acts  and 
thoughts.  Such  indications,  it  is  added,  would  not  be  contained  in  a 
few  fine  sayings,  scattered  here  and  there  amidst  heaps  of  evil  and 
offensive  matter  ;  they  could  not  be  gathered  from  the  works  of  a 
rhetorician  like  Seneca,  who  lived  after  the  advent  of  Christ,  and 
might  have  availed  himself  of  some  Christian  notions — they  ought 
to  be  something  different  from  the  mere  notions  about  immor- 
tality, and  an  indestructible  part  of  our  nature,  which  have  been 
floating  in  the  minds  of  civilized  and  savage  men,  and  which 
acquired  a  sort  of  argumentative  consistency,  but  no  practical  in- 
fluence in  the  minds  of  the  Roman  Stoics  and  Academicians ;  they 
cannot  be  drawn  from  the  mere  denials  of  the  polytheistic  creeds 
into  which  some  of  the  Greek  philosophers  were  led,  and  which 
issued  only  in  an  atheistic  or  at  best  in  a  pantheistic  theory  :  even 
the  instance  of  a  man  practically,  and  with  some  steadiness,  recog- 
nising a  standard  of  right,  would  not  be  satisfactory  if  it  should 
appear  that  his  thoughts,  and  those  of  all  heathens  who  preceded 
or  followed  him,  were  moving  in  directly  opposite  lines.  I  fully 
admit  the  justice  of  these  maxims,  and  I  take  them  for  my  guide 
when  I  state  the  reasons  which  induce  me  to  think  that  Fox,  though 
he  knew  nothing  about  the  men  of  the  old  world,  was  right  in  the 
judgment  which  he  formed  respecting  them. 

In  the  best  and  most  recent  works*  on  Greek  philosophy  its  his- 
tory is  divided  into  the  periods  before  and  after  Socrates.  That 
this  arrangement  is  the  true  and  natural  one,  I  think  every  one  will 
admit,  who  has  compared  it  with  the  older  methods,  and  has  ob- 

*  In  that  by  Ritter  for  example. 


58 


OBJECTIONS  TO 


served  what  light  it  throws  upon  the  growth  and  sequence  of 
speculations  which  had  been  regarded  as  independent  of  each  other. 
Yet  there  would  seem  at  first  sight  to  be  insuperable  objections  to 
it :  Socrates  left  no  books ;  the  difficulty  of  ascertaining  which  of 
his  disciples  reported  his  opinions  most  correctly,,  what  his*  opinions 
were,  nay,  whether  he  had  any,  has  been  a  subject  of  frequent 
complaint :  all  the  interest  of  his  doctrine  has  been  said  to  be  con- 
tained in  his  life.  How  is  it  then  possible  that  he  should  be  a  cen- 
tre to  the  theories  and  systems  of  his  countrymen  ? 

The  answer  seems  to  me  to  be  this  : — Whatever  difference  there 
may  be  in  the  accounts  of  him  which  have  been  delivered  to  us, 
they  all  testify — the  satirical  one  by  the  comedian  of  Athens,  as 
clearly  as  the  narratives  of  Xenophon  and  Plato,* — that  he  saw  in 
the  life  of  man  the  struggle  between  two  principles,  one  tending 
downwards,  one  upwards;  one  belonging  to  the  earth,  one  claim- 
ing fellowship  with  something  pure  and  divine.  Those  who  sup- 
pose him  to  be  a  mere  ironist  or  skeptic  cannot  deny  that  whatever 
his  words  do  not  mean,  they  do  mean  this;  those  who  are  most  in- 
clined to  reduce  his  thoughts  and  those  of  all  other  men  to  a  sys- 
tem, must  yet  admit  that  this  doctrine  lay  at  the  basis  of  his  system, 
and  that  it  is  one  which  must  find  a  more  complete  exposition  in  a 
man's  acts,  or  in  his  familiar  intercourse  with  persons  of  different 
tempers  and  pursuits,  than  it  can  ever  find  in  a  formal  treatise. 
Accordingly,  it  seems  not  strange  that  one  observer  should  be 
struck  chiefly  with  the  efforts  which  he  made,  in  the  discipline  of 
his  own  mind  and  in  that  which  he  recommended  to  his  scholars, 
to  overcome  sensual  inclinations,  and  to  raise  his  spirit,  by  all  means, 
the  traditions  and  faith  of  his  country  among  the  rest,  to  higher 
and  purer  apprehensions  :  that  another  should  have  been  shocked 
by  the  tendency,  which  such  attempts  to  deliver  himself  and  others 
from  the  worship  of  outward  things  must  have  had  to  weaken  his 
and  their  respect  for  the  gods  of  his  country :  that  another,  of 
deeper  and  more  earnest  meditation,  should  have  perceived,  in  the 
conviction  which  governed  his  master's  life,  distinct  and  personal 
at  it  appeared,  the  hint  of  a  method  by  which  men  might  be  led 
out  of  their  vagueness,  their  superstitions,  and  their  unbelief,  into 
the  pursuit  of  permanent  truth ;  by  which  also  the  imperfect  hints, 

*  See  Note  (C). 


THE  QUAKER  THEOLOGY  CONSIDERED. 


59 


crude  generalizations,  and  seemingly  contradictory  discoveries  of 
previous  thinkers  might  be  interpreted,  quickened,  and  reconciled. 
This  last  notion  may  easily  have  occurred  to  any  one  who  felt 
how  he  himself,  and  noticed  how  other  young  men  of  the  day  were 
compelled  to  acknowledge  Socrates  as  the  interpreter  of  the  feel- 
ings which  were  at  work  confusedly  within  them,  and  of  the  ob- 
jects at  which  they  were  blindly  aiming.  It  makes  itself  good  to 
us  by  the  experiment  to  which  I  alluded ;  we  are  able,  by  taking 
Socrates  as  our  guide,  to  understand  what  the  Greeks,  for  many 
generations  before  and  after  his  time,  were  in  different  directions 
pursuing.  But  if  so,  we  must  admit  that  while  the  worth  and  pe- 
culiarity of  the  life  of  Socrates  consisted  in  this,  that  he  aimed 
steadfastly,  of  course  amidst  many  inconsistencies,  after  a  pure  and 
invisible  good,  and  sought  to  overcome  the  obstacles  in  himself 
and  in  the  world  which  hindered  him  from  apprehending  it,  this 
characteristic  does  not  separate  him  from  the  thinkers  of  the  old 
world,  or  entitle  us  to  view  him  as  a  prodigy;  but  rather  enables 
us  to  see,  what  we  otherwise  should  not  have  seen  so  clearly,  that 
the  like  struggle  was  going  forward  consciously  in  every  better  and 
truer  man — unconsciously,  in  all.  Such,  I  believe,  is  the  witness 
which  the  records  of  Greek  philosophy  bear  in  favour  of  Fox's 
doctrine. 

It  may,  however,  be  said  that  this  testimony  isn  ot  complete ; 
for  that  whereas  Fox  uniformly  spoke  of  a  personal  teacher  ot 
men,  the  doctrine  of  Socrates  goes  no  further  than  to  the  acknow- 
ledgment of  a  search  or  appetite  in  man  after  a  supreme  good, 
which  need  not  be  personal,  or  if  personal,  may  not  necessarily 
have  originated  these  desires,  or  even  have  taken  any  interest  in 
them. 

I  believe  no  one  who  attends  carefully  to  the  language  of  So- 
crates, or  of  his  greater  pupil,  will  suppose  that  he  doubted  whether 
the  longings  and  movements  of  his  spirit  had  a  divine  source  and 
were  subject  to  a  divine  impulse  or  no.  His  deep  conviction  that 
he  was  under  the  guidance  of  an  attending  demon,  the  continual 
reference  which  he  makes  to  traditional  stories,  his  firm  faith  in 
divine  interposition  and  judgments,  are  proofs  that  he  was  not 
merely  seeking  to  apprehend  "  the  Being,"  but  also  acknowledg- 
ing often,  if  not  habitually,  that  a  Being  had  first  taken  cognizance 


60 


OBJECTIONS  TO 


of  him.  I  admit,  however,  that  the  remark  has  a  certain  degree 
of  force;  I  admit  that  so  far  as  Socrates  was  simply  a  philosopher, 
(in  the  sublimest  sense  of  that  word,)  so  far  he  was  acting  merely 
as  the  seeker  after  what  is  true  and  good,  not  as  the  receiver 
of  an  influence  from  it.  His  high  merit  was,  that  he  acknow- 
ledged the  need  of  something  besides  philosophy  in  order  that 
he  might  realize  the  meaning  of  philosophy  ;  a  very  peculiar 
merit,  indeed,  setting  him  and  Plato  at  an  immeasurable  distance 
from  those  who  followed,  and  from  most  of  those  who  preceded 
them  ;  but  still,  perhaps,  the  very  merit  which  makes  him  of  such 
importance  as  the  interpreter  of  other  schools.  Be  that  as  it  may, 
there  is  one  fact  which  is  well  worthy  of  notice  in  reference  to  this 
point.  So  soon  as  a  Jew  was  able  to  study  and  understand  the 
writings  of  the  Greek  philosophers,  the  defect  which  is  complained 
of  was  supplied.  Philo  recognised  all  the  cries  of  the  w7iser  heathen 
afterlight,  and  wisdom,  and  truth,  as  genuine  indications  of  the  feel- 
ings which  the  writings  of  the  prophets  had  prepared  him  to  expect 
would  be  in  all  men,  and  as  produced  by  the  teaching  and  inspira- 
tion of  the  Divine  Word.  So  much  has  been  written  of  late  respect- 
ing the  general  purpose  and  character  ol  his  writings,  that  I  need 
not  multiply  proofs.  A  few  are  given  in  a  note,  merely  as  speci- 
mens of  a  tone  of  thinking  which  could  not  have  been  so  habitual 
in  one  man,  if  it  had  not  been  adopted  by  many.* 

Some  modern  critics  have  maintained,  that  the  study  of  Philo  is 
the  proper  introduction  to  the  study  of  the  Fathers.  I  do  not 
mean  to  discuss  the  truth  or  limits  of  that  proposition.  The  ground 
of  it  is  unquestionably  the  discovery  of  a  close  resemblance  be- 
tween the  language  of  one  class  of  the  Fathers,  those  who  lived  in 
Alexandria  before  the  period  of  the  Arian  controversy,  and  that  of 
Philo  respecting  the  Divine  Word.f  This  resemblance  has  gen- 
erally been  acknowledged ;  any  inconvenient  inferences  from  it  be- 
ing avoided,  by  describing  these  Fathers  in  particular,  and  often 
the  Fathers  in  general,  as  the  Platonizing  doctors,  who  mingled  the 
pure  truths  of  Christianity  with  Gentile  Philosophy.  It  is  very 
difficult  to  encounter  such  phrases,  for  this  reason,  that  they  are 
phrases  merely.  Those  Fathers  who  w7ere  brought  into  immediate 
contact  with  the  Philosophers  told  them,  as  they  believed  on  the 

*  See  Note  (D).  t  See  Note  (E). 


THE  QUAKER  THEOLOGY  CONSIDERED. 


61 


authority  of  Scripture,  that  the  Divine  Word  had  been  speaking 
to  the  conscience  and  reason  of  men  in  all  ages,  and  by  various 
acts  of  discipline  had  been  urging  them  to  turn  from  their  idols 
and  seek  Him.  They  affirmed,  that  whenever  any  man  had  ex- 
hibited any  kindly  or  affectionate  feeling,  any  earnest  zeal  for 
truth,  this  Invisible  Guide  had  inspired  him  with  it.  They  showed 
no  mercy  to  the  fables  of  Paganism  or  to  the  conceits  of  philoso- 
phers ;  they  merely  declared  that  all  error  was  the  forsaking  of 
God's  guidance — all  sincere  and  good  thoughts  the  obeying  it. 

The  question,  whether  in  using  this  language  theyren  dered 
more  honour  to  mere  human  wit  and  judgment,  than  the  persons 
who  attribute  to  these  alone  all  that  was  generous  and  true  in  the 
acts  or  feelings  of  heathens,  I  leave  to  the  understandings  of  my 
readers :  the  question  whether  it  is  wise  or  decorous  to  attack  men, 
whom  I  may  venture,  I  suppose,  without  offence,  to  call  pious  and 
venerable,  not  by  showing  wherein  they  contradicted  Scripture, 
but  by  affixing  to  them  the  nickname  of  Platonizing — I  leave  to 
the  consciences  of  those  who  are  in  the  habit  of  using  such  lan- 
guage. One  thing  at  least  is  evident,  that  Fox  the  shoemaker  of 
the  17th  century,  was  the  first  person  who  understood  the  verses 
at  the  beginning  of  St.  John's  Gospel  in  a  literal  not  a  metaphor- 
ical sense.  Before  I  quit  this  part  of  my  subject,  I  must  take  leave 
to  remark,  that  the  kind  of  charge  which  is  brought  against  the 
Fathers  who  adopted  this  doctrine  shows  very  clearly  whence  the 
main  objection  to  it  has  been  derived.  We  are  told,  and  some- 
times in  a  very  solemn  manner,  to  beware  how  we  corrupt  the  sim- 
plicity of  the  Gospel  by  philosophy  and  vain  deceit.  Perhaps  the 
caution  may  be  less  applicable  to  Fox  and  the  Quakers,  than  to 
some  others ;  for  he  hated  Greek  and  Philosophy  most  cordial- 
ly, and  his  followers  have  in  general  retained  this  part  of  his 
opinions  with  great  fidelity  ;  still,  it  is  an  important  caution,  which 
those  to  whom  it  is  offered  should  receive  gratefully,  and  for  which 
they  cannot  show  their  value  in  any  way  so  effectually  as  by  re- 
turning it.  I  believe  that  any  one,  who  is  at  the  pains  to  investi- 
gate the  origin  of  his  own  opinions,  will  discover  that  neither  rev- 
erence for  Scripture,  nor  a  great  love  for  simplicity,  but  precisely 
the  addiction — I  must  call  it,  the  slavish  addiction — to  a  certain 
system  of  philosophy  which  established  itself  in  this  country  about 


62 


OBJECTIONS,  ETC. 


the  time  of  the  Revolution,  is  consciously  or  unconsciously  the 
cause  of  this  dislike  to  a  principle  which  has  been  recognised  by 
the  humblest,  arid  most  ignorant  men,  as  well  as  by  the  most  pro- 
found. Ever  since  the  position  was  adopted  as  a  new  and  sur- 
prising truth,  (which  previous  thinkers  had  looked  upon  as  one  of 
the  most  plausible,  most  natural,  and  most  degrading  forms  of 
error,)  that  there  is  no  knowledge  but  that  which  comes  to  us 
through  the  senses,  the  idea  of  a  communion  between  the  Divine 
Word  and  the  heart  and  conscience  and  reason  of  men  has  been  of 
course  rejected.  The  subject  will  often  recur  in  the  course  of  our 
inquiries. 

II.  I  need  say  very  little  about  the  two  other  main  articles  of 
the  Quaker  faith  ;  first,  because  the  principle  of  them  is  contained 
in  that  which  we  have  been  examining,  and  secondly,  because  they 
are  admitted  to  a  certain  extent,  and  under  some  conditions,  by 
nearly  all  Christians.  The  proposition,  for  instance,  that  Christ 
came  to  establish  a  spiritual  kingdom,  a  kingdom  not  of  this  world, 
different  from  the  Jewish,  in  being  less  .carnal  and  more  spiritual, 
is  constantly  proclaimed  by  those  English  Dissenters  who  are  moot 
inclined  to  denounce  Fox's  primary  tenet  as  unscriptural  and  false. 
Only  they  think  that  he  pushed  this  truth  to  an  extreme.  They 
think  the  kingdom  is  spiritual,  but  not  quite  so  spiritual  as  he  fan- 
cied. So  also  with  reference  to  the  gift  of  the  Spirit  and  the  sub- 
ordination of  man's  powers  and  utterances  to  his  government — they 
believe  that  what  Fox  said  was  true  up  to  a  certain  point,  but  that 
there  is  great  danger  of  going  beyond  that  point.  I  shall  have  op- 
portunities of  examining  the  plea  for  these  restrictions  hereafter. 
At  present,  I  will  only  say  that,  far  from  thinking  that  the  Quakers 
have  carried  their  principles  to  an  excess,  I  believe  all  their  errors 
have  arisen  from  the  narrow,  imperfect  and  earthly  notions  which 
they  entertain  respecting  the  nature  of  a  spiritual  kingdom,  and 
from  the  low  estimate  which  they  have  formed  of  that  transcendent 
gift  which  God  bestowed  upon  his  creatures  when  his  Holy  Spirit 
came  down  to  dwell  among  them.  My  meaning  will  appear  more 
clearly  when  I  have  spoken  of  the  negative  articles  of  Quaker 
Theology. 


THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 


63 


SECTION  III. 
THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 

1.  It  is  not  difficult  to  imagine  in  what  way  the  principle  of  an 
inward  light  must  have  affected  the  mind  of  a  man  educated  as  Fox 
was,  provided  he  were  perfectly  earnest  and  sincere.  I  have  spoken 
of  his  doctrine — unquestionably  it  was  his  doctrine,  for  it  was 
that  which  he  taught  wherever  he  went ;  if  I  had  called  it  a  dogma 
I  should  perhaps  have  described  very  exactly  that  which  it  has  be- 
come to  modern  Quakers ;  but  assuredly  neither  word  would  have 
seemed  to  him  the  correct  one.  He  had  actually  discovered  a  law 
to  which  he  himself  was  subject — to  which  every  other  man  was 
subject ;  would  any  one  tell  him  that  this  was  a  mere  notion  like 
those  about  justification,  sanctification,  final  perseverance,  and  so 
forth,  which  he  had  heard  proclaimed  from  the  pulpits  of  the  day  ? 
The  language  of  the  preachers  and  of  the  books  might  be  about 
something  which  concerned  him  and  all  men ;  but  he  had  discov- 
ered the  very  thing  thing  itself ;  he  had  a  fact  to  proclaim,  not 
a  theory  or  a  system.  From  the  very  first,  therefore,  he  began  to 
denounce  dogmas  and  formulas  as  corrupting  and  misleading.  The 
young  mechanic  told  the  preachers,  who  had  been  trained  in  all 
the  distinctions  and  divisions,  which  the  Westminister  Assembly 
with  such  infinite  labour  and  discussion  had  wrought  out,  that  they 
knew  nothing  about  the  matter  they  were  talking  of.  Those  who 
had  silenced  their  brethren  for  their  want  of  spiritual  knowledge, 
were  rebuked,  and  sometimes  silenced,  (by  the  voice  of  a  man,  not 
the  vote  of  a  trying  Committee,)  for  the  self-same  sin.  But  \i for- 
mulas were  evil  things,  could  form  s  be  better?  Here  were  men 
professing  outward  acts  and  ceremonies,  and  between  these  and  the 
Christian  life  they  said  or  signified  that  there  was  an  intimate  con- 
nection. Strange,  almost  incredible  blindness !  Did  not  the  Chris- 
tian life  consist  in  following  an  inward  Guide,  an  invisible  Teacher, 
in  eschewing  that  which  was  visible  and  sensible  ?  What  could 
these  outward  things  have  to  do  with  that  ?  The  argument  was 
irresistible.  It  was  a  main  part  of  Fox's  vocation  to  bear  witness 
against  such  idolatries. 


64 


THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 


2.  Possibly  the  thought  may  sometimes  have  occurred  to  one 
who  studied  the  Old  Testament  diligently,  that  forms  had  been  in 
the  olden  time  the  very  testimonies  for  this  light,  the  very  means 
by  which  the  Jews  were  warned  against  sensual  worship ;  that 
they  were  converted  by  those  Jews  into  excuses  for  the  indulgence 
of  a  natural  idolatry  ;  but  yet  that,  being  God's  appointed  protests 
against  it,  and  the  means  which  He  had  devised  for  delivering  men 
from  .it,  they  were  actually  appealed  to,  from  age  to  age,  by  the 
prophets  who  were  raised  up  to  tell  the  people  of  their  sins  ;  these 
prophets  being  in  fact  far  more  diligent  observers  of  the  forms  than 
the  sensualists  and  the  hypocrites  whom  they  denounced  for  neglect- 
ing their  meaning.  I  say,  such  a  thought  as  this  may  have  glanced 
into  the  mind  of  Fox,  and  with  it  the  reflection,  that  possibly  a 
method  which  was  good  once  might  be  good  still.  But  he  was 
able  to  silence  such  suggestions,  or  to  dismiss  them  as  proceeding 
from  an  evil  source,  by  the  second  doctrine  of  which  I  spoke.  Till 
the  appearance  of  Christ,  this  might  be  true  ;  but  He  came  to  es- 
tablish a  Spiritual  and  Universal  Dispensation.  A  spiritual  dis- 
pensation, therefore  outward  institutions,  like  that  of  circumcision, 
like  that  of  a  passover,  like  that  of  a  priesthood,  like  that  of  an 
outward  sacrificial  worship,  like  that  of  particular  sacred  seasons, 
are  abolished.  But  are  not  Baptism,  the  Eucharist,  a  Ministry 
appointed  by  imposition  of  hands,  and  divided  into  three  permanent 
orders,  Liturgies,  the  observance  of  Fasts  and  Festivals,  equally 
visible  and  outward  ?  On  what  plea  then  have  you  substituted 
one  set  of  ceremonies  for  another,  when  you  profess  to  be  members 
of  a  spiritual  kingdom  ? 

Moreover,  the  dispensation  is  to  be  universal  as  well  as  spiritual. 
National  distinctions,  therefore,  are  no  more ;  they  belong  to  the 
economy  of  the  world.  War  has  been  the  fruit  of  these  ;  under  a 
spiritual  and  universal  dispensation,  war  is  a  sin.  Nations  have 
always,  the  Jewish  nation  as  much  as  the  rest,  invoked  God  as  the 
witness  of  their  ordinary  transactions — Oaths  are  forbidden  under 
the  new  dispensation.  Nations  have  generally  made  a  provision 
for  the  ministers  of  religion,  and  regarded  them  as  parts  of  the  com- 
monwealth. Such  arrangements  are  altogether  inconsistent  with  a 
spiritual  and  universal  dispensation. 

3.  As  the  Quakers  turned  away  with  disgust  from  all  confes- 


THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 


65 


sions  whatsoever,  it  was  not  likely  they  would  distinguish  between 
the  dogmatic  articles  which  were  drawn  up  in  later  ages  of  the 
Church,  and  the  creeds  which  had  been  adopted  in  its  infancy.  At 
all  events,  even  the  simplest  of  these  creeds  was  objectionable  to 
them,  because  it  directs  our  thoughts  to  the  outward  acts  and  events 
of  our  Lord's  life  upon  earth,  rather  than  to  his  presence  in  the 
heart.  It  was  a  more  difficult  question  how  they  should  regard  the 
Scriptures.  These  recorded  actual  events,  and  appeared  to  have  an 
outward  character.  Yet  the  Bible  was  the  only  book  of  which  Fox 
and  several  of  his  brethren  knew  any  thing.  In  it  he  had  found  the 
strongest  confirmation  of  all  that  he  believed.  The  language, 
therefore,  of  the  Quakers  became  more  tinctured  with  the  phrase- 
ology of  Scripture  than  that  of  any  sect;  while,  nevertheless,  they 
described  it  in  language  which  the  members  of  no  other  sect  would 
have  ventured  to  use.  The  reading  of  it  was  said  to  be  rather  a 
luxury  than  necessity  to  the  believer,  and  nothing  wTas  more  im- 
portant than  that  he  should  derive  his  knowledge  from  the  inward 
teacher,  not  from  the  outward  book.  No  doubt  warnings  about 
the  danger  of  trusting  in  the  letter,  and  still  more  about  the  impos- 
sibility of  finding  a  meaning  in  it  without  help  of  another  kind, 
had  been  common  in  the  writings  of  learned  doctors  before,  and 
even  since,  the  Reformation.  But  it  wTas  evident  that  they  acquired 
a  new  and  much  stronger  meaning  among  the  Quakers.  That 
meaning  was  deduced  from  the  doctrine  concerning  Spiritual  In- 
fluences. He  only  was  a  true  teacher,  who  had  been  called  by  the 
inward  voice ;  he  was  only  teaching  rightly  at  any  moment  when 
he  was  obeying  that  voice.  How  then,  they  argued,  can  he  be  at 
the  same  time  subject  to  the  dominion  of  a  book  ?  He  may  read 
it,  and  passages  in  it  might  be  brought  to  his  mind ;  but  he  will 
only  apply  them  properly  when  he  feels  in  the  position  of  those 
who  wrote  the  book  \  speaking  by  the  same  inspiration  which  ac- 
tuated them.  The  book  may  be  the  best  of  all  books,  but  it  must 
be  valuable  as  an  instrument,  not  strictly  as  an  authority.  Such 
seems  to  have  been  their  practical  conclusion,  though  the  words  in 
which  it  was  expressed  might  often  vary. 

It  seemed  to  follow  still  more  obviously,  from  this  belief  of  an 
immediate  spiritual  influence,  that  preparatory  studies  for  the  work 
of  the  ministry  were  unlawful  and  faithless.   Studies  as  such  might 

5 


66 


ON  THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING 


not  be  positively  forbidden,  but  as  the  teachers  were  in  some  sense 
the  standards  of  thinking  and  feeling,  it  was  impossible  that  a  sense 
of  the  inexpediency,  if  not  the  sinfulness,  of  any  high  mental  culti- 
vation should  not  have  diffused  itself  among  the  disciples  generally. 

A  body  asserting  the  positive  doctrines,  and  having  the  negative 
characteristics  I  have  described,  gradually  formed  itself,  and  as- 
sumed to  itself  the  name  of  The  Society  of  Friends.  This  Society, 
its  members  believed,  was  called  into  existence  to  exhibit  the 
features  of  that  kingdom  which  Christ  came  into  the  world  to 
establish.  Without  wishing  to  be  uncharitable,  or  denying  that 
there  might  be  good  men  who  did  not  belong  to  it,  yet  they  prac- 
tically looked  upon  it  as  the  Church  of  God  on  earth — the  witness 
against  the  world.  They  were,  therefore,  to  keep  themselves  en- 
tirely from  the  habits  of  this  world,  from  its  varying  fashions,  from 
its  amusements,  and,  as  far  as  might  be,  from  its  phraseology. 
With  these,  the  so-called  Christian  body  had  become  defiled ;  nay, 
the  very  devices  by  which  it  had  seemed  to  assert  its  existence  were 
themselves  earthly  and  sensual,  bearing  no  testimony  whatever  to 
the  distinction  between  the  light  and  darkness,  to  the  spirituality 
and  universality  of  the  kingdom,  and  to  the  presence  of  the  Spirit. 


SECTION  IV. 

ON  THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING  OF  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 

We  are  now  to  inquire  whether  this  body  has  fulfilled  the  office 
to  which  its  founders  believed  that  it  was  divinely  appointed.  Let 
us  see  what  evidence  is  admissible  in  this  case,  and  how  much  it 
will  prove.  Quakers  are  agreed  with  us  in  believing  that  one  of 
the  characteristics  of  a  divine  Church  is  permanency.  It  was  never 
intended  to  last  only  for  a  generation ;  on  the  contrary,  it  exists  to 
testify  against  a  changing,  capricious  world.  Neither  we  then,  nor 
they,  are  entiled  to  plead  the  ordinary  law  of  decay  in  human 
bodies,  as  an  excuse  for  the  Church  failing  to  perform  the  functions 
to  which  it  has  been  appointed.  Both  of  us  must  suppose  that  this 
tendency  has  been  foreseen  by  Him  whose  handiwork  the  Church 
is,  and  that  in  some  way  or  other  its  effects  have  been  counter- 
acted.   The  peculiarity  of  the  Quakers  is,  that  they  suppose  per- 


OF  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 


67 


manent  institutions,  permanent  symbols,  which  man  may  misinter- 
pret from  time  to  time,  but  which  continue  to  testify,  in  spite  of  his 
misinterpretations  and  against  them,  are  not  the  remedy  or  even 
one  of  the  remedies  which  has  been  provided  against  this  danger. 
The  condition  of  a  spiritual  body,  according  to  them,  is,  that  it  rests 
in  the  faith,  the  purity,  the  vitality  of  its  individual  members.  This 
being  the  case,  it  must,  I  conceive,  be  admitted,  that  all  confessions 
by  them  of  degeneracy  from  an  older  standard  are  very  startling. 
They  can  intimate  little  less  tha,n  this,  that  the  constitution  or  king- 
dom which  God  has  set  up  in  the  world,  has  been  overcome  and 
crushed  by  the  world's  kingdom  which  is  opposed  to  it.  Yet 
such  confessions  are  most  numerous  in  the  writings,  not  of  one  but 
of  all  the  different  divisions  of  Quakers  in  the  present  day.  They 
take  different  forms  according  to  the  views  of  the  persons  who 
make  them ;  but  in  one  form  or  other  they  may  be  traced  every- 
where. Still  I  am  far  from  thinking  that  such  evidence  as  this, 
however  much  it  may  excite  the  anxious  inquiries  of  Quakers, 
could  be  sufficient  of  itself  to  prove,  either  to  them  or  to  us,  that 
the  experiment  had  failed.  The  indications  of  that  fact  should  be 
very  palpable  ;  they  should  not  rest  upon  the  feelings  or  observa- 
tions of  any  particular  persons,  however  impartial  or  even  however 
prejudiced  in  favuor  of  the  system,  and  they  should  be  clearly  and 
obviously  connected  with  the  form  and  order  of  the  Society  ;  other- 
wise I  think  they  ought  not  to  be  produced,  at  least  for  the  purpose 
of  disturbing  the  confidence  of  any  one  who  still  cleaves  to  it. 

1.  One  such  indication  must,  I  think,  suggest  itself  to  every 
thoughtful  person.  All,  said  the  Quakers,  who  are  not  walking  in 
the  divine  light,  who  do  not  recognise  the  presence  and  the  guidance 
of  an  invisible  teacher,  are  of  the  world.  The  pure  and  holy  com- 
pany, the  Church,  the  Society  of  Friends,  must  consist  of  all  who 
are  led  by  the  Spirit  to  perceive  their  connection  with  the  invisible 
Guide,  and  to  follow  him  whithersoever  He  may  lead  them.  See- 
ing that  there  was  no  body  of  men  answering  to  this  description, 
such  a  body  must  be  formed  ;  and  all  who  did  not  attach  them- 
selves to  it,  must  in  practice  be  treated  as  belonging  to  the  world. 
Thus  far  all  seems  easy.  One  might  fancy  there  was  a  little  ex- 
clusiveness;  that  a  few  persons  were  treated  as  aliens,  who  might 
possibly  be  citizens  of  the  household  of  God ;  but  this  could  not 


68 


ON  THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING 


be  helped.  There  was  need  of  a  palpable  distinction  between  the 
true  men  and  the  false.  If  the  distinction  were  not  perfect,  it  was 
at  least  good  so  far  as  it  went  •  and  faithful  men  must  expect  that 
the  Spirit  of  God  would,  in  due  time,  bring  all  to  see  that  this  was 
the  society  to  which  they  should  belong.  But  soon  a  difficulty 
arose,  for  wThich  the  founders  of  the  society  seem  to  have  made  no 
provision.  Children  are  born  to  the  members  of  it.  What  are 
these  ?  Friends  or  world-citizens  ?  The  consistent  answer  wrould 
have  been,  "  They  are  of  the  world  ;  they  are  not  consciously  fol- 
lowing the  light ;  till  they  do  so,  it  is  a  mere  dream  and  contradic- 
tion to  reckon  them  in  the  society."  But  feeling,  and,  as  I  believe^ 
conscience  gave  a  different  answer.  They  said,  these  must  by  all 
means  belong  to  the  society ;  if  not,  it  is  a  sin  to  have  been  agents 
in  giving  them  existence.  The  only  resource  was  to  use  all  pos- 
sible means  for  separating  these  children,  outwardly  at  least,  from 
the  surrounding  world.  The  parents  would  then  feel  that  they  had^ 
done  their  best,  and  they  would  think  as  little  as  possible  of  the 
falsehood  which  lay  at  the  root  of  the  whole  proceeding.  But  it 
is  only  for  a  certain  time  that  any  falsehood  can  be  hidden.  This 
one  is  now  making  itself  palpable.  The  younger  Quakers  look 
about,  and  ask  themselves  what  it  means  that  they  are  kept  from 
the  world  1  If  the  world  means  those  who  do  not  walk  in  the 
light,  there  is  a  world  within  the  society  as  well  as  without  it. 
Would  not  their  fathers  have  been  right  to  exclude  the  idea  of  con- 
sanguinity from  the  society  altogether?  For  it  is  evident  that 
between  the  law  by  which  human  society  is  propagated,  and  the 
law  which  governs  this  body,  there  is  no  connecting  link.  The 
heavenly  kingdom  has  nothing  to  do  with  earthly  relationships. 
Unless  the  body  could  be  continually  recruited  by  conversions  from 
the  ranks  of  the  world,  it  seems  as  if  it  could  never  escape  from  the 
penalty  of  constantly  violating  the  very  distinction  for  which  its 
presence  was  meant  to  be  the  abiding  testimony. 

2.  But  the  Quaker  Society  was  to  be  the  witness  for  the  exist- 
ence of  an  Universal  Kingdom.  In  this  faith  Penn  went  forth  and 
preached  to  the  Indians.  He  was  satisfied  that  they  had  in  them  a 
sense  of  right  and  wrong,  that  the  Word  was  speaking  to  them  as 
well  as  to  other  men.  I  believe  the  results  of  his  very  interesting 
mission  show  how  true  the  conviction  was  which  encouraged  him 


OF  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM.  69 

to  undertake  it.  But  what  else  do  they  prove  ?  Did  the  settlement 
of  Pennsylvania  become  the  members  of  a  great  missionary  society  ? 
Did  it  attract  to  itself  the  aboriginal  Indians  and  the  English 
settlers  ?  It  grew  up  into  a  colony  of  prosperous  traders,  maintain- 
ing a  very  creditable  position  in  the  states,  distinguished  by  certain 
badges  of  dress  and  manners  from  the  neighbouring  people,  in- 
creasing according  to  the  ordinary  rate  of  increase  in  the  popula- 
tion, indifferent  beyond  the  rest  of  the  sects  to  missionary  enterprises. 
I  speak  of  America,  because  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  system  has 
not  been  fairly  tried  there.  But  whether  you  look  at  Quakerism 
in  that  country  in  which  it  flourished  by  persecution,  or  in  that 
where  it  had  the  greatest  opportunities  for  expansion,  I  ask  what 
witness  has  it  borne  for  universality,  what  signs  does  it  make  to 
prove  that  it  is  the  universal  kingdom  which  was  to  be  set  up  on 
earth  ? 

Perhaps  it  maybe  said  that  the  philanthropy  of  the  Quakers  is  a 
testimony  to  that  feeling  of  fellowship  with  the  whole  human  race, 
which  their  principles  of  an  universal  light  and  an  universal  king- 
dom were  likely  to  foster.  I  am  very  far  indeed  from  wishing  to 
deny  the  existence  of  this  philanthropy,  or  to  detract  from  its  merits. 
I  can  have  no  motive  to  do  so,  for  I  inwardly  and  heartily  sub- 
scribe the  doctrine  which  is  supposed,  and  I  think  rightly,  to  be  the 
only  ground  of  sympathy  with  man  as  man.  I  have  no  doubt  that 
it  is  that  principle,  or  the  tradition  of  it,  which  has  brought  forth 
whatever  has  been  sound  and  good  in  the  feelings  of  the  Quakers 
for  their  white  and  black  brethren.  But  the  question  which  we 
are  now  considering  is — How  far  is  the  Quaker  system  a  witness 
on  behalf  of  that  principle  ?  and  to  this  question,  I  fancy,  the  mode 
in  which  the  benevolence  of  Quakers,  in  late  years  especially,  has 
displayed  itself,  is  a  most  striking  and  conclusive  answer.  For  the 
moment  that  they  began  to  do  any  thing  besides  bearing  individual 
testimonies,  the  moment  they  attempted  to  perform  some  general, 
social,  organic  acts  on  behalf  of  their  fellow-creatures,  that  moment 
they  found  it  necessary  to  fraternize  with  the  members  of  other 
societies.  They  became  members  of  societies  for  distributing  the 
Bible,  societies  for  emancipating  the  negroes,  societies  for  promoting 
universal  peace.  Assuredly  Fox  and  Penn  would  have  done  no 
such  thing.   They  would  have  said  :  "  Our  society  being  raised  up 


70  ON  THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING 

and  constituted  by  God  Himself  to  be  the  witness  for  what  is  spi- 
ritual and  universal  against  that  which  is  earthly  and  national,  is 
the  Bible  society,  the  emancipation  society,  the  peace  society  ;  we 
know  of  no  other — there  can  be  no  other."  The  notion  of  uniting 
with  the  world  for  the  sake  of  promoting  spiritual  objects  would 
have  seemed  to  them  most  monstrous  ;  and  yet  their  followers  have 
adopted  this  method  as  the  only  one  they  know  of  for  carrying  out 
the  Quaker  principles. 

3.  Among  the  benevolent  projects  of  this  day,  there  is  none 
which  has  interested  the  Quakers  more  than  the  progress  of  edu- 
cation ;  they  have  been  almost  the  founders  of  the  British  and 
Foreign  School  Society,  and  its  greatest  supporters.  The  present 
is  not  the  opportunity  for  discussing  any  point  connected  with  this 
subject  in  which  I  may  differ  from  them.  I  refer  to  their  exem- 
plary zeal  in  reference  to  it  for  the  purpose  of  noticing  now  much 
it  clashes  with  the  Quaker  system,  so  far  as  that  system  puts  for- 
ward an  assertion  of  the  doctrine  of  spiritual  influences.  The 
Quaker  minister  speaks  only  when  an  immediate  perceptible 
impression  determines  him  that  he  ought  to  speak.  To  prepare 
for  his  work,  to  receive  any  regular  appointment  to  it,  to  be  paid 
for  it,  is  incompatible  with  the  spiritual  nature  of  the  function. 
But  the  Quaker  teacher,  or  the  teacher  whom  the  Quaker  supports 
in  a  school,  must  have  a  formal  appointment,  must  prepare  regular 
lessons,  must  receive  a  regular  salary.  It  follows  either  that  the 
spiritual  minister  is  not  appointed  to  educate,  or  that  education  is 
not  spiritual.  If  education  be  as  important  as  the  Society  of 
Friends  and  as  I  think  that  it  is,  what  testimony  is  borne  here  to 
the  spiritual  economy,  or  to  the  spiritual  influences  which  go  forth 
that  men  may  be  able  to  administer  that  economy  ?  Education, 
which  is  to  have  so  mighty  an  influence  upon  society,  is  to  be  con- 
ducted upon  principles  precisely  the  reverse  of  those  which  are 
proclaimed  to  be  the  only  spiritual  principles. 

"  But  the  Quakers,"  it  is  said,  "  have  borne  a  more  consistent 
testimony  than  others  against  the  habits  and  maxims  of  the  world." 
I  do  not  mean,  at  present,  to  inquire  what  precise  meaning  we 
ought  to  attach  to  this  word  world, — I  take  the  signification  which 
it  bears  among  religious  people  generally,  and  the  Society  of 
Friends  especially.    Now  the  world,  in  their  sense,  though  it  may 


OF  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM.  71 

be  built  upon  one  common  evil  principle,  assumes  many  shapes 
and  appearances ;  and  it  must  be  admitted,  I  think,  that  the  body 
which  is  raised  up  to  protest  against  it  at  any  particular  period,  or 
in  any  particular  locality,  ought  to  bear  witness  mainly  against  the 
form  or  appearance  which  is  most  characteristic  of  that  time  or 
locality.  A  society  which  should  testify  against  gladiatorial  exhi- 
bitions in  the  nineteenth  century,  or  against  cannibalism  in  Europe, 
might  be  entitled  to  the  praise  of  great  prudence,  but  could  scarcely 
allege  any  strong  evidence  of  a  divine  vocation.  (  The  position  of 
the  Quakers  has  been  exclusively  or  almost  exclusively  in  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States  of  America  during  the  period  between 
the  Civil  Wars  and  the  reign  of  Queen  Victoria.  I  ask  any  plain 
person  to  tell  me  what  he  thinks  has  been  the  characteristic  sin  of 
these  two  countries  during  this  time  especially.  That  there  have 
been  persons,  a  large  body  of  persons  in  each,  who  have  been 
devoting  themselves  to  amusements  of  one  kind  or  other,  and  have 
made  them  the  end  of  life,  I  do  not  doubt ;  but  assuredly  no  one, 
comparing  England  and  America  with  France  or  Italy,  would 
affirm  that  the  pursuit  of  pleasure  has  been  the  especial  sin  of  us 
and  our  Transatlantic  children — least  of  all,  that  it  has  been  the 
especial  sin  of  that  part  of  our  respective  populations  with  which 
the  Quakers  are  brought  into  contact,  and  whose  evils,  therefore, 
they  ought  most  to  have  denounced.  Again,  it  is  indisputable  that 
a  certain  number  of  persons  have  pursued  literature  and  mental 
cultivation  as  the  end  of  life,  and  have,  for  the  sake  of  it,  over- 
looked higher  and  more  universal  ends.  But  certainly  this  has  not 
been  our  chief  infirmity  ;  other  European  nations  have  been  far 
more  tempted  by  it.  One  deep  radical  disease  has  been  infecting 
our  two  countries,  and  during  the  last  two  centuries  has  been 
entering  deeper  and  deeper  into  our  constitution  till  it  has  now 
nearly  reached  the  vitals  of  both.  Will  not  every  one  say  that  it 
has  been  money -getting  ?  How,  then,  has  the  Society  of  Friends 
borne  witness  by  its  habits  and  constitution  against  this  sin  ?  It 
says,  indeed,  that  no  portion  of  the  wealth  of  the  body  is  to  be  set 
apart  for  the  support  of  its  ministers  j  that  their  subsistence  is  to  be 
entirely  precarious.  This  may  be  construed  into  a  proof  that 
money  has  nothing  to  do  with  that  which  is  spiritual.  But  I  con- 
fess I  do  not  see  how  this  testimony  is  to  act  upon  the  world,  when 


*  $ 

72  ON  THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING 

they  find  that  Friends — believing  all  amusements,  and  many 
branches  of  mental  cultivation,  to  be  necessarily  evil,  to  be  actually 
incapable  of  being  sanctified  to  a  good  purpose, — believe  that  the 
acquisition  of  wealth  is  not  only  a  safe  and  lawful  thing,  but  is  to 
be  emphatically,  and  by  the  very  nature  of  the  community,  the 
business  of  every  one  who  enters  it.  A  society,  the  members  of 
which  are,  to  all  outward  appearance — its  ministers  as  well  as 
others — principally  occupied  in  trade,  nay,  which  till  lately  had  a 
fear  of  being  occupied  in  any  thing  else,  is  to  be  the  witness  against 
a  world,  which  has  for  its  most  characteristic,  most  irreligious  dis- 
tinction, the  worship  of  mammon. 

But  has  the  existence  of  such  a  body  as  the  Society  of  Friends 
had  no  influence  at  all  in  inducing  men  to  believe  that  the  heart 
and  spirit  of  men  are  intended  to  converse  with  holy  and  invisible 
things  1  I  hope  that  it  has  had  this  effect.  I  cannot  believe  that 
any  system  is  permitted  to  exist  which  is  not  working  some  good ; 
possibly  there  are  minds  (out  of  the  Society  I  mean — of  course 
there  must  have  been  many  in  it)  to  whom  Quakerism  has  sug- 
gested thoughts  which  nothing  else  would  have  suggested.  But 
yet  it  seems  to  me  that  the  positive  witness  which  it  has  borne  in 
favour  of  spirituality  is  of  the  most  equivocal  kind.  I  am  afraid 
if  the  majority  of  Quakers  were  asked  wherein  the  peculiar 
spirituality  of  their  body  consisted,  they  would  answer — "  In  our 
not  baptizing,  not  keeping  an  outward  feast,  not  offering  up  pre- 
pared prayers,  not  having  an  outwardly  ordained  ministry."  And 
unquestionably  this  a^iswer  would  express  very  much  the  feeling 
which  the  sight  of  such  a  society  communicates  to  indifferent  per- 
sons who  behold  it  from  a  distance.  A  man  of  the  world,  who 
thinks  the  ordinances  of  the  Church  troublesome  or  unmeaning, 
observes,  perhaps,  to  himself  now  and  then,  that  the  Quakers  con- 
trive to  dispense  with  these  ordinances,  and  yet  are  a  very  religious 
and  thriving  people.  But  at  another  time  he  will  be  equally 
struck  with  the  observation,  that  though  they  have  none  of  these 
indications,  they  have  others  which  seem  to  him  not  less  outward 
and  visible.  They  have  no  fixed  forms  of  prayer,  but  they  have 
a  fixed  form  of  dress ;  they  have  rejected  sacraments,  but  they 
retain  a  particular  kind  of  language.  Surely  a  man  who  is  inquir- 
ing with  some  confusion  what  spiritual  Christianity  means,  must 


OF  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM.  73 


be  somewhat  puzzled  when  he  is  told — Those  are  the  marks  of  a 
formal  earthly  body ;  these  of  one  essentially  spiritual  and  divine. 

It  may  be  supposed  that  these  are  mere  accidents  of  the  Quaker 
profession,  which  show  what  a  tendency  to  formalism  there  is  in 
the  human  mind,  but  which  may  be  laid  aside  by  those  who  under- 
stand the  true  objects  of  the  Society.  There  cannot  be  a  greater 
mistake.  The  younger  Quakers  are  probably  very  impatient  of 
these  restrictions ;  but  it  is  not  because  they  have  an  insight  into 
any  essential  principles ;  on  the  contrary,  indifference  to  the  out- 
ward badges  is  very  generally  accompanied  by  indifference  to  the 
ideas  on  w^hich  Quakerism  rests,  or  by  an  attachment  to  them  only 
as  far  as  they  are  opposed  to  something  else.  All  the  older  and 
more  earnest  members  of  the  Society  maintain,  and  I  believe  on 
the  most  just  and  philosophical  grounds,  that  these  peculiarities, 
unimportant  as  they  may  seem,  cannot  be  safely  abandoned ;  that 
the  very  existence  of  Quakerism  is  involved  in  their  preservation. 
They  assert,  it  seems  to  me  with  equal  truth,  that  every  relaxation 
of  the  rules  which  the  first  Quakers  laid  down  respecting  amuse- 
ments, or  literary  pursuits,  tends  to  make  the  existence  of  the 
body  less  intelligible ;  nay,  tends  to  a  directly  immoral  result,  by 
exhibiting  all  restraints  upon  self-indulgence  as  hard  and  unneces- 
sary burdens,  which  are  to  be  avoided  as  far  as  prudence  and  the 
opinions  of  others  will  permit. 

I  do  not  venture  to  predict  how  rapid  may  be  the  process  of 
decay  in  a  body  which  exhibits  these  symptoms.  At  present  Qua- 
kerism is  threatened  from  without  on  two  sides — on  the  Evangelical 
side,  and  on  the  Unitarian.  Here  in  England  the  younger  Quakers 
desire,  in  general,  to  be  more  like  those  who  profess  what  are 
called  the  doctrines  of  the  Reformation  ;  in  America  they  have 
been  powerfully  attracted  in  the  opposite  direction.  It  is  quite 
possible  that  these  feelings  may  not  lead  to  any  great  secessions 
from  the  Society,  besides,  those  wThich  they  have  caused  already. 
But  one  or  other  of  these  influences  will  be  henceforth  predomi- 
nant ;  Quakerism  will  have  less  and  less  a  basis  of  its  own.  All 
its  grand  pretensions  are  at  an  end ;  its  greatest  defenders  speak 
of  it  now  not  as  the  Church  or  Kingdom  of  God,  but  as  the  best 
of  the  sects  which  compose  the  religious  world.  Such  language 
can  never  satisfy  those  who  retain  any  of  the  old  Quaker  spirit. 


74        ON  THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING  OF  THE  QUAKER  SYSTEM. 


They  must  believe  that  there  is  a  spiritual  kingdom  somewhere  ; 
if  they  cannot  find  it  in  the  Society  of  Friends,  they  will  look 
for  it  in  those  opposing  systems  of  which  I  have  spoken.  Let 
us  inquire,  what  prospect  they  have  of  being  rewarded  for  their 
search. 


CHAPTER  II. 


PURE  PROTESTANTISM. 


SECTION  L 

THE  LEADING  PRINCIPLES  OF  THE  REFORMATION. 

Justification  by  Faith—  Election— The  Written  Word— Authority  of  National  Sovereigns 

L  The  inward  struggles  of  Martin  Luther  were  at  least  as  terri- 
ble as  those  of  George  Fox,  and  they  have  left  far  more  remarkable . 
testimonies  of  themselves  in  the  history  of  Europe.  For  as  the 
character  of  Quakerism  was  determined  by  the  conflicts  in  the 
mind  of  the  Drayton  shoemaker,  so  the  character  of  the  Reforma- 
tion is  interpreted  by  those  which  tormented  the  Monk  of  Wit- 
tenburg. 

In  some  respects  there  was  a  resemblance  between  them.  Any 
one  who  reads  attentively  the  first  document  which  Luther  put 
forth  against  the  sale  of  indulgences,  must  perceive  how  deeply 
and  inwardly  he  had  realized  the  conviction,  that  he  was  a  two- 
fold being  ;  that  there  was  in  him  that  which  required  to  be  crush- 
ed and  destroyed ;  that  there  wTas  that  in  him  which  was  meant  to 
enjoy  life  and  peace  and  freedom.  A  man  could  hardly  have  ar- 
rived at  such  a  conviction,  or  at  least  have  been  able  to  express  it 
in  such  language,  who  had  not  experienced  much  of  what  Fox  de- 
scribes. But  yet  the  history  of  their  minds  was  altogether  differ- 
ent ;  nay,  the  contrast  is  as  remarkable  as  we  can  expect  to  find  in 
the  lives  of  two  men,  both  equally  sincere  and  brave. 

Of  a  light  speaking  to  his  conscience  warning  him  of  the  evil 
he  had  done  and  of  the  temptations  within  and  without  which  were 
tempting  him  to  forsake  it,  Luther  knew  as  much  as  any  Quaker 
could  have  told  him.  But  the  thought  of  such  a  light,  instead  of 
giving  him  peace,  was  the  cause  of  all  his  tumult  and  confusion. 
It  spoke  to  him  of  a  Being  of  absolute  power  and  wisdom  and 
righteousness,  between  whom  and  himself  there  was  no  sympathy. 
It  bade  him  seek,  by  all  means,  to  be  reconciled  to  that  Being, 
and  account  all  trials  and  sufferings  light,  if  so  be  they  might  but 


76 


ON  THE  LEADING  PRINCIPLES 


give  a  promise,  now  or  hereafter,  of  such  a  blessing.  But  it  told 
him  also  of  a  strict,  irreversible  law,  from  which  there  could  be  no 
departure,  no  dispensation ;  and  the  recollection  of  which  made 
every  effort  to  heal  the  breach  between  him  and  his  Maker  a  new 
witness  to  him  that  it  was  perpetual.  Then  came  the  dream  of  a 
possible  deliverance  from  the  curse  of  this  law,  brought  to  him  in 
words  which  he  had  heard  from  his  infancy,  but  to  which  till  then 
he  had  been  unable  to  attach  any  meaning.  He  had  been  told  of 
a  Mediator  between  the  Creator  and  his  creatures  ;  of  his  having 
offered  a  sacrifice  for  men ;  of  their  being  united  or  grafted  into 
him ;  of  their  possessing  a  righteousness  in  Him  which  they  had 
•  not  in  themselves.  These  words,  or  words  like  these,  had  been 
uttered  again  and  again  by  doctors  and  schoolmen  whom  he  had 
studied.  But  they  had  been  mixed  with  the  strangest  perplexities 
about  cases  of  conscience ;  the  effects,  kinds,  and  degrees  of  re- 
pentance ;  the  distinction  of  mortal  and  venial  sins ;  the  nature 
and  the  mode  of  justification.  And  if  there  were  such  scholastic 
obstructions  to  a  man's  escape  from  that  which  he  felt  and  knew 
to  be  a  state  of  evil,  there  were  still  some  monstrous  practical  ob- 
structions which  seemed  to  destroy  all  intercourse  between  the 
soul  of  man  and  his  deliverer.  The  sops  which  were  given  to  the 
conscience  by  indulgences,  the  unfulfilled  promises  held  out  to  it 
by  penances  which  really  tormented  the  spirit  more  than  the  flesh, 
all  the  notions  of  intervening  mediators,  beseeching  for  the  re- 
moval of  the  curse  which  had  been  already  borne  by  Him 
who  alone  could  bear  it,  and  who  alone  could  fully  sympa- 
thize with  the  miseries  of  those  for  whom  He  suffered,  were  so 
many  bandages  and  fetters  upon  the  human  soul ;  making  it  con- 
tent with  the  sin  that  it  loved,  or  hopeless  of  real  deliverance  from 
the  sin  which  it  loathed.  It  was  the  Bible  which  set  Luther's 
mind  free  from  the  perplexities  of  the  scholastic  logic.  It  was  by 
help  of  the  creeds  and  sacraments  of  the  Church  that  he  was  able 
to  disengage  himself  from  the  intricate  web  of  papal  inventions. 
The  written  word  of  God  seemed  to  him,  from  beginning  to  end, 
to  be  witnessing,  that  a  man  is  justified  by  faith ;  no  school 
phrases  being  used  to  express  the  idea,  but  every  act  of  affiance  in 
a  Divine  Person  who  had  revealed  Himself  to  man  as  the  object  of 
his  trust  and  confidence  being  an  exemplification  of  it.    He  could 


OF  THE  REFORMATION. 


77 


thus  see  the  meaning  of  St.  Paul's  assertion,  that  Abraham  was 
justified  by  faith.  He  trusted  in  God's  promise  and  word,  and 
that  made  him  a  godly  and  righteous  man.  All  the  Psalms, 
in  like  manner,  were  nothing  but  acts  of  faith  and  affiance,  where- 
by a  man,  crushed  down  with  all  kinds  of  evils,  inward  and  out- 
ward, rose  up  and  claimed  that  relation  to  God  which  his  covenant 
had  given  him,  and  shook  off  the  sins  into  which  he  had  fallen 
from  forgetting  it.  Still  these,  properly  speaking,  were  acts  of 
trust  in  a  Mediator  ;  they  were  recognitions  of  one  to  whom  the 
suppliant  himself  was  related,  who  was  a  bond  between  him  and 
the  absolute  God,  in  whom  alone  he  could  dare  to  call  upon  Him. 
Therefore  all  these  were  foretastes  and  anticipations  of  the  justifi- 
cation which  the  Son  of  God  made  for  all  who  would  trust  in  Him, 
when,  having  offered  up  his  body  as  a  sacrifice,  he  rose  again  from 
the  dead.  To  announce  this  work  as  accomplished ;  to  tell  men 
that  they  became  righteous  by  believing  it,  and  so  entering  into 
union  with  their  Lord  and  Master — this  was,  Luther  believed,  the 
great  end  of  St.  Paul's  life.  He  believed  also  that  it  was  his  own 
appointed  office.  It  was  the  business  of  the  preacher  in  every  age 
to  tell  men  this  truth  simply,  using  the  direct  personal  language 
of  the  Bible,  instead  of  the  formal  and  dogmatic  language  of  the 
schools.  But  not  the  man  only  was  bearing  witness  of  this  prin- 
ciple. The  Creed  was  preaching  it,  the  Sacraments  wTere  preach- 
ing it,  and  the  truly  instructed  doctor  would  find  in  these  the  deepest 
wisdom,  and  would  labour  that  they  might  carry  that  home  prac- 
tically and  in  effect  to  men,  which  he  could  only  utter  in  words. 
This,  it  seems  to  me,  is  Lutheranism  according  to  Luther ;  and  in 
this  Lutheranism  lies  the  germ  of  all  the  doctrines  which  peculiarly 
belong  to  the  Reformation,  though  it  might  be  the  work  of  other 
minds  than  his  distinctly  to  evolve  them. 

2.  The  principal  of  these  is  that  which  Luther  proclaimed  with 
so  much  vehemence  in  his  controversy  with  Erasmus,  but  which 
yet,  it  is  quite  evident,  could  not  have  been  as  habitually  present 
to  his  mind  as  it  was  to  that  of  the  Helvetian  Reformer,  John  Cal- 
vin The  idea  of  an  object  to  which  a  man  might  look,  and  in 
which  he  might  rest,  took  precedence  of  all  others  in  the  heart  and 
reason  of  Luther.  Unless,  when  he  were  driven  to  it  by  some 
dogma  like  that  of  Erasmus,  which  seemed  to  him  to  threaten  the 


78  ON  THE  LEADING  PRINCIPLES 

revival  of  all  papal  contrivances  for  the  reconciliation  of  man,  he 
troubled  himself  little  about  the  origin  of  those  feelings  and  acts, 
whereby  a  man  apprehends  Him  who  offers  himself  to  his  faith  and 
hope.  It  is  clear,  however,  not  only  from  this  treatise  of  Luther, 
but  from  the  very  character  of  his  doctrine,  that  this  question  must 
suggest  itself,  and  that  it  must  receive  some  such  solution,  as  he 
and  Calvin  found  for  it.  The  idea  of  an  absolute  will,  with  which 
man  must  be  brought  into  reconciliation  by  a  Mediator,  lay  at  the 
base  of  all  Luther's  thoughts.  Any  man,  fixedly  meditating  upon 
those  thoughts  and  the  results  to  which  they  had  led,  must  have 
asked  himself:  But  who  devised  this  whole  scheme  of  reconcilia- 
tion and  redemption  ?  Who  is  it  that  leads  men  to  avail  them- 
selves of  it  !  Who  is  it  that  determines  the  operations  of  their 
minds,  and  the  consequences  to  which  they  shall  lead  ?  Such 
questions  had  at  all  times  occupied  the  schools.  Augustine,  who 
appeared  to  have  determined  them  in  the  same  way  as  Calvin,  had 
ever  been  regarded  as  one  of  their  highest  oracles.  The  difference 
was  the  same  in  this  case  as  in  the  last :  the  principle  that  man  is 
to  look  to  God  as  the  direct  source  of  his  acts,  and  thoughts,  and 
purposes,  was  presented  to  the  faith  of  men  in  the  real  language 
of  Scripture,  and  not  to  the  understandings  of  men  in  the  abstract 
language  of  the  schools.  Those  who  apprehended  their  relation  to 
Christ  were  to  speak  of  themselves  as  the  elect  people  of  God,  just 
as  Samuel,  or  David,  or  the  Israelites  did,  and  to  believe  that  they 
would  have  been  miserable  and  accursed  if  God  had  not  elected 
them.  They  were  not  to  trouble  themselves  with  questions  about 
the  will,  or  to  seek  any  other  reason  for  their  blessedness  than  that 
it  was  God's  good  pleasure  to  give  it  them.  On  the  other  hand, 
this  belief  was  to  be  the  conclusive  barrier  against  all  impostures 
of  Romish  priests,  those  impostures  being  efforts  to  persuade 
men  that  they  must  seek  by  their  own  efforts  to  win  a  position, 
which  ought  to  be  received  as  the  gift  of  God.  This,  I  think,  is 
the  Calvinistic  side  of  Protestantism.  To  some  it  may  appear  that 
I  have  given  to  it,  as  well  as  to  the  doctrine  of  justification,  too 
little  of  a  scholastic  character ;  that  I  have  spoken  of  it  too  much 
as  something  that  opposed  itself  to  the  logical  systems  of  the  previ- 
ous age,  whereas  Calvin  as  well  as  Melancthon  and  some  of  the 
German  Reformers,  were  remarkable  for  their  devotion  to  logic. 


OF  THE  REFORMATION j 


79 


Nevertheless,  I  believe  that  I  am  right.    How  the  scholastic  tend- 
encies of  the  Reformation  afterward  developed  themselves,  I  may 
have  occasion  to  explain  presently.    Here  I  will  only  remark  that 
the  Reformers  who  had  been  trained  by  the  schoolmen  would  of 
course  preserve  many  of  their  characteristics ;  that  men  with  a 
strong  bias  for  dialectics,  may  often  be  those  who  are  led  to  feel 
most  strongly  the  want  of  what  is  practical  and  popular,  and  to  seek 
out  a  practical  and  popular  language;  and  that,  in  fact,  those  who 
have  commented  most,  either  in  the  way  of  praise  or  blame,  upon  the 
scholastic  qualities  which  appear  in  the  controversial  writings  of  the 
Reformers,  have  yet  always  contended  also  that  the  Reformation  it- 
self was  an  appeal  to  the  feelings  and  sympathies  of  common  men, 
3.  If  then  the  Lutheran  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  be  the 
first,  and  the  doctrine  of  election,  as  formerly  asserted  by  Calvin, 
the  second,  I  think  most  persons  will  agree  with  me  in  considering 
a  certain  peculiar  estimate  of  the  Scriptures  the  third  characteristic 
of  Reformation  theology.    But  there  are  one  or  two  questions  con- 
nected with  this  point.    No  one  acquainted  with  the  writings  of  the 
Reformers  would  say  that  they  were  more  scrupulous  in  their  treat- 
ment of  their  Canon  of  Scripture  than  the  doctors  who  preceded 
them.    Luther's  language  about  the  Epistle  of  St.  James  and  the 
book  of  Revelation,  though  it  may  have  been  retracted  in  his  later 
days,  would  be  conclusive  against  such  an  opinion,  even  if  there 
were  nothing  similar  in  the  writings  of  his  contemporaries.  Neither 
can  it  be  said  that  either  Luther  or  Calvin  regarded  the  Bible  as  a 
book  from  which  persons  without  any  previous  initiation  would,  as 
a  matter  of  course,  derive  light  and  teaching.    They  rather  looked 
upon  it  as  a  divine  witness  to  men  already  engaged  in  a  conscious 
struggle  with  their  evil  nature,  respecting  the  character  of  that 
struggle,  and  the  means  whereby  they  could  obtain  deliverance  out 
of  it.    Such,  at  least,  I  conceive  was  the  view  most  present  to  the 
mind  of  the  German  Reformer ;  the  Bible  was  especially  the 
preacher's  book,  out  of  which  he  was  to  tell  men  how  those  of  the 
same  flesh  and  blood  with  themselves  had  fought  the  battle  with 
the  world  and  the  flesh  and  the  devil  before  them,  and  what  man- 
ner of  strength  and  help  God  had  vouchsafed  them  in  it.    At  the 
same  time,  it  was  a  fixed  and  permanent  authority,  which  mounted 
above  all  the  notions  and  experiences  of  particular  minds,  and  en- 


80 


ON  THE  LEADING  PRINCIPLES 


abled  them,  even  in  defiance  of  such  notions  and  experiences,  to 
discover  solid  grounds  of  peace  and  comfort.  It  is  manifest  then 
that  veneration  for  the  Bible,  high  place  as  it  held  in  Luther's  mind, 
was  subordinate  to  his  zeal  in  asserting  the  doctrine  of  Justification. 
He  looked  upon  the  Bible  mainly  as  the  witness  for  that  doctrine, 
and  because  it  was  such  a  witness  he  loved  it  with  all  his  heart, 
and  would  have  given  up  his  life  that  men  might  in  their  own  lan- 
guage hear  what  it  said.  The  same,  though  in  a  less  degree,  must 
have  been  true  of  Calvin;  the  Bible  was  the  witness  to  him  of  the 
divine  Election ;  on  that  account  mainly  it  was  precious  to  him, 
and  no  diligence  that  could  be  employed  in  studying  and  expound- 
ing it  were  thrown  away.  But  if  the  Scripture  were  valuable  as 
the  announcement  of  one  or  other  of  these  great  ideas  or  principles, 
was  it  not  in  itself  a  great  idea  or  principle  that  there  was  such  a 
book  as  a  Bible,  a  book  speaking  directly  to  the  conscience  of  men, 
a  fixed  and  permanent  utterance  of  the  divine  will  ?  To  some  (I 
should  think  to  Zuinglius)  this  seemed  the  cardinal  idea  of  the  Re- 
formation, to  which  other  ideas  were  subordinate.  At  all  events, 
there  was  a  body  which  gradually  began  to  be  separated  by  im- 
portant peculiarities  from  the  other  Reformers ;  and  of  this  body, 
faith  in  the  Scriptures,  with  a  less  distinct  reference  to  the  princi- 
ples taught  in  them,  seems  to  have  been  the  most  striking  positive 
characteristic. 

4.  These  three  principles  seem  to  me,  in  the  strictest  sense, 
positive  principles.  They  are  not  the  less  so  because  they  were 
brought  forth  in  opposition  to  certain  popular  notions  and  current 
practices.  On  the  contrary,  here  lies  the  very  test  and  proof  of 
their  positive  character.  There  were  a  number  of  abominations 
prevalent  when  Luther  appeared,  which  Romanists  not  only  now 
but  then  abhorred.  Some  of  them  were  corrected  or  mitigated  at 
the  Council  of  Trent ;  some  of  them  disappeared  when  the  infidel 
temper  of  Leo  and  the  Roman  court  of  that  day  gave  place  to  the 
more  earnest  spirit  of  the  succeeding  popes.  But  great  as  this  dis- 
gust may  have  been,  evident  as  it  was  that  the  disgust  had  reached 
to  the  people  of  the  different  countries  in  Christendom,  and  that  a 
class  had  arisen  in  them  which  was  disposed  to  assert  a  position 
independent  alike  of  the  hierarchy  and  of  the  aristocracy,  it  was 
still  a  question — a  very  solemn  question — with  the  wiser  and  better 


OF  THE  REFORMATION.  81 

men,  how  far  it  was  possible  to  remedy,  or  safe  to  denounce,  even 
the  most  crying  abuses.  The  building  is  tottering ;  ought  we  to 
touch  it  under  the  pretence  of  repairing  it  ?  This  was  a  question 
which  Sir  Thomas  More,  and  other  men  as  good  as  he,  may  have 
asked  themselves,  and  for  which  they  may  have  found  it  impossible 
to  find  a  theoretical  answer,  though  they  did  practically  answer  it 
by  sitting  still.  Were  they  wrong  1  I  would  not  dare  to  say  so. 
It  seems  to  me,  that  looking  upon  these  corruptions  merely  as  the 
excess  of  something  that  was  good,  they  were  clearly  right.  Nay, 
even  if  they  felt,  as  I  make  no  doubt  they  did  feel,  that  the  loss  of 
faith  was,  in  some  most  important  sense,  the  cause  of  these  super- 
stitions— still  more  of  the  contrivances  to  make  them  profitable — 
yet  if  they  could  not  perceive  that  there  was  some  great  truth  hid- 
den or  contradicted  by  these  portions  of  the  popular  system,  they 
were  evidently  committing  the  great  hazard — if  we  ought  not 
rather  to  call  it  the  sin — of  taking  away  something  which  had  a 
certain  hold  upon  the  affections  of  men  without  giving  them  any 
substitute  for  it.  Which  argument  must  have  acquired  a  great  con- 
firmation in  the  minds  of  those  men  who  had  wisdom  and  opportu- 
nity to  remark  what  kind  of  change  had  been  taking  place  in  the 
mind  of  Europe,  and  what  kind  of  cravings  those  were  which  threat- 
ened the  Church.  The  feeling — I  do  not  belong  merely  to  a  great 
Christendom,  I  have  a  distinct  individual  position,  was  evidently 
that  which  had  developed  itself  in  the  members  of  the  new  class ; 
which  made  them  eager  to  grasp  at  novelties,  ready  to  follow  par- 
ticular guides,  but  impatient  of  systematic  authority.  The  wise 
observers,  in  some  countries,  might  be  able  to  perceive  that  this 
feeling  was  connected  with  another,  which  they  could  allow  to  be 
more  wholesome  and  more  worthy  of  encouragement.  The  trades- 
man, German  or  English,  along  with  his  Hussite  or  Lollardite 
notions,  had  a  sense  of  belonging  to  a  particular  soil,  and  speaking 
a  particular  language,  which  was  often  far  less  strong  in  the  noble- 
man. But  this  conviction  interfered  as  much  as  the  other  with 
submission  to  Church  authority,  and  with  an  affection  for  Church 
ordinances.  It  gave  rise  to  strange  questionings  about  the  domin- 
ion of  the  Roman  Bishop,  to  stories  about  the  spirit  wTith  which 
kings  and  emperors  in  former  days  had  resisted  him,  to  a  dislike  of 
the  universal  language.    Was  it  not  clear  then  that  the  age  had  a 

6 


82  ON  THE  LEADING  PRINCIPLES 

violent  inclination  towards  infidelity  and  irreverence ;  that  every 
acknowledgment  of  an  error  which  had  been  sanctioned  or  tolerated 
by  Churchmen,  tended  to  make  this  inclination  irresistible;  and 
that  the  only  duty  of  men,  who  wished  well  to  the  preservation  of 
society,  nay,  of  truth,  was  to  uphold,  as  well  as  they  could,  the 
entire  system  ? 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  Reformers  were  led  by  God's  providence 
to  find  the  only  escape  which  was  possible  out  of  this  fearful 
dihnma.  They  were  led  to  perceive  that  certain  great  moral 
principles,  involved  in  the  very  idea  of  a  relation  between  God  and 
his  creatures — say  rather  that  the  belief  in  that  relation  itself — were 
outraged  by  the  existing  Roman  system.  The  abuses  of  that  sys- 
tem were  not  excesses ;  they  were  essentially  evil ;  they  had  their 
root  in  a  great  denial  and  unbelief.  They  set  at  nought  great  facts 
concerning  man  and  concerning  God — facts  which  had  been  an- 
nounced by  an  express  revelation  from  heaven.  Here  was  a  stand- 
ing point ;  and  I  do  maintain,  and  would  earnestly  press  the  asser- 
tion— that  Protestantism  has  a  standing  point  of  its  own  ;  that  it 
is  not  merely  condemnatory,  merely  negative  ;  and  that  so  far  as  it 
keeps  within  its  own  proper  and  appointed  province,  it  denounces 
and  condemns  only  that  which  is  itself  negative,  and  which  sets  at 
nought  something  that  is  needful  for  the  life  and  being  of  man. 

To  the  question,  what  that  something  is,  and  what  therefore  is 
the  appointed  province  of  Protestantism,  I  have  already  indicated 
what  seems  to  me  the  true  answer.  The  feeling  which  was  most 
strongly  awake  at  the  time  that  Luther  appeared,  was  the  feeling 
in  each  man  that  he  was  an  individual  man,  not  merely  one  of  a 
mass.  Luther  did  not  create  this  thought;  it  was  there.  He  strug- 
gled with  it  in  himself,  and  would  fain  have  overcome  it ;  but  it 
was  too  strong  for  him.  He  was  obliged  to  find  some  interpreta- 
tion of  it ;  he  was  not  at  peace  till  he  found  one,  which  told  him 
that  the  only  safe,  free,  true  position  of  a  man,  is  not  a  position  of 
rebellion,  but  of  allegiance;  a  position  involving  the  subjection  of 
the  whole  soul  to  a  righteous  and  divine  government.  The  clew 
which  led  him  out  of  the  perplexities  of  his  own  mind,  was  that 
which  thousands  besides  him  needed  ;  they  received  it  and  rejoiced. 
To  say  that  he  was  a  minister  of  sedition,  or  that  he  raised  up  min- 
isters of  sedition,  is  easy,  because  it  is  easy  to  misrepresent  history, 


OF  THE  REFORMATION.  83 

and  to  attribute  the  evil  consequences  of  certain  states  of  mind  to 
those  who  were  God's  instruments  in  preventing  them  from  being 
universal.  But  those  who  look  steadily  and  impartially  at  the  facts, 
not  wishing  (and  I  think  I  have  shown  that  I  have  no  wish)  to  re- 
present them  to  the  disadvantage  of  those  who  opposed  Protest- 
antism, will,  I  believe,  be  more  and  more  convinced,  that  the  Reform- 
ers did  not  call  forth  the  rebellious  activity  of  the  period  in  which 
they  lived,  but  when  it  was  seeking  a  refuge  in  infidelity,  taught  it 
to  find  one  in  faith. 

The  three  principles  of  which  I  have  spoken  contained  the  re- 
ligious satisfaction  of  that  sense  of  an  individual  position  which  the 
men  of  the  sixteenth  century  were  experiencing.  1  have  hinted 
that,  closely  connected  with  this,  was  another — the  sense  of  a  dis- 
tinct national  position.  The  fourth  principle  of  Protestantism  was 
the  recognition  of  this  feeling  also,  as  true,  and  as  having  a  reli- 
gious basis.  The  protest  against  the  usurpation  of  the  Bishop  of 
Rome  was  not  mainly  grounded  upon  the  idea  of  its  interference 
with  the  prerogatives  of  Christ  over  the  whole  Church.  I  do  not 
say  that  idea  may  not  have  been  often  put  forward  by  the  Reform- 
ers; I  do  not  say  that  it  may  not  have  frequently  dawned  upon 
them  as  the  principle  which  this  temporal  authority  invaded.  But 
I  do  not  think  it  was  constantly  present  to  their  minds,  that  it  was 
ever  fully  developed  in  them,  or  that  when  they  used  language 
which  implied  it,  that  language  conveyed  precisely  the  same  mean- 
ing to  them  which  it  conveys  to  us. 

They  may  also  have  alluded,  in  terms  of  displeasure  or  even 
reprobation,  to  the  assumption  by  one  bishop  of  an  authority  over 
others ;  but  I  cannot  persuade  myself  that  this  was  a  sin  which 
would  have  induced  them  to  reject  the  papal  authority.  Their  con- 
tempt of  it  arose,  as  they  became  more  and  more  convinced  that 
that  was  true  and  necessary  which  an  infallible  wisdom  had  pro- 
nounced to  be  erroneous  and  mischievous,  and,  as  they  observed, 
how  it  had  interfered  with  the  power  and  functions  of  the  National 
Sovereigns.  By  many  links  the  peculiar  theology  of  the  Reform- 
ation was  connected  with  the  assertion  of  the  dignity  of  this  office, 
and  of  the  national  distinctness  which  it  represents ;  one  is  very 
obvious.  The  Reformers  had  resorted  to  the  Scriptures  not  merely 
for  their  authority,  but  for  their  practical  character.    But  that 


84 


OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


practical  character  is  especially  exhibited  in  the  Old  Testament, 
and  in  the  Old  Testament  every  truth  is  brought  out  in  relation  to 
the  events  of  a  national  history.  Their  own  time  interpreted  the 
Scriptures  to  the  Reformers,  and  the  Scriptures  in  turn  interpreted 
their  own  time. 


SECTION  II. 

OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES  OP  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 

I  have  already  noticed  one  primary  objection  against  all  these 
doctrines,  one  which,  according  to  my  judgment,  would  be  fatal  to 
thern  ;  that  they  are  merely  negative — merely  the  contradiction  of 
that  faith  which  Romanists  hold. 

But  there  are  also  particular  objections  against  each  of  them 
which  it  is  necessary  to  examine. 

1.  One  charge  which  is  brought  against  the  Lutheran  doctrine 
of  justification  by  faith,  belongs  especially  and  characteristically  to 
the  Quakers.  It  is  said  that  justification  by  faith  either  means  the 
same  thing  as  the  doctrine  of  the  Indwelling  Word,  or,  if  it  mean 
something  different,  that  one  of  them  is  false.  Either  (it  is  con- 
tended) the  light  dwelt  with  men  or  it  did  not :  if  it  did,  the  fol- 
lowing that  light  is  justification;  if  it  did  not,  the  whole  doctrine 
of  Fox  (which  I  have  defended)  is  untenable.  Men  must  be  jus- 
tified by  the  agreement  of  their  minds  with  a  certain  inward  prin- 
ciple, or  by  certain  outward  acts  done  on  their  behalf.  To  say  that 
a  man  is  in  his  right  state  with  himself  and  before  God  when  he 
subjects  himself  to  the  Indwelling  Word,  and  that  a  man  is  justified 
in  consequence  of  certain  acts  which  Christ  performed  as  his  re- 
presentative, is  impossible.  Now  I  readily  admit  that  the  temper 
of  mind,  which  leads  a  man  vehemently  to  assert  one  of  these  doc- 
trines, is  not  the  same  temper  of  mind  which  leads  him  to  assert  the 
other;  nay, that  these  tempers  are  not  very  often  found  coexisting 
in  any  great  strength.  The  Quaker  and  the  Mystic,  (to  use  that 
word  in  an  indifferent  sense,  not  in  the  evil  sense  which  I  gave  to 
it  in  my  first  chapter,)  habitually  contemplate  a  divine  presence  in 
the  heart ;  they  associate  that  presence,  very  probably,  with  the 
life  of  our  Lord  ;  but  if  they  do  so,  consciously  or  unconsciously  they 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


85 


affix  an  import  to  his  acts  and  words  which  is  different  from  their 
obvious  historical  import.  The  Lutheran  habitually  contemplates 
a  Divine  Person,  having  a  real  distinct  life ;  rejoices  that  he  enter- 
ed into  ordinary  human  relations  and  circumstances  ;  realizes  his 
own  connection  with  him  through  those  relations  and  circumstances. 
Unquestionably  any  one  who  has  observed  himself,  and  knows  how 
very  different  were  the  feelings  which  at  different  times  of  his  life 
have  attracted  him  in  these  two  directions,  will  not  be  slow  to  con- 
fess that  Quakerism  and  Lutheranism  have  something  in  their 
nature  which  is  even  curiously  antipathic.  But  I  fancy  the  same 
observation  will  equally  incline  him  to  the  opinion  that  each  of  these 
doctrines  is  the  complement  of  the  other,  and  that  in  spite  of  their 
apparent  opposition,  neither  can  exist  in  any  real  strength  if  the 
other  be  denied. 

To  explain  what  I  mean,  let  us  consider  what  were  the  actual 
wants  and  anxieties  of  the  men  in  the  old  world,  who  experienced 
the  struggle  between  the  light  and  darkness  of  wrhich  Fox  has 
spoken.  Must  not  such  thoughts  as  these  have  been  continually 
present  to  their  minds : — Here  are  two  powers  struggling  within 
me,  one  good,  one  evil ;  sometimes  one  prevails,  sometimes  the 
other ;  sometimes  the  darkness  seems  about  to  be  scattered,  some- 
times the  light  seems  almost  quenched  :  but  I,  who  am  I,  in 
the  midst  of  all  this  awful  struggle?  Do  I  belong  to  the  light, 
or  the  darkness  ?  Of  which  have  I  a  right  to  call  myself  the 
child  now ;  of  which  shall  I  be  the  child  for  ever  1  The  con- 
sciousness of  evil,  of  rebellion  against  a  power  continually  exerting 
itself  for  my  good,  testifies  against  me;  my  belief  in  the  gracious- 
ness,  in  the  mightiness  of  the  Being  who  is  on  my  side,  speaks  in 
my  favour:  but  then,  what  awful  outward  facts  seem  to  corrobo- 
rate the  former  conclusion  !  All  the  outward  sicknesses,  sorrows, 
troubles  of  the  world,  seem  to  be  lifting  up  their  voice  to  condemn 
me, — to  be  proving  that  my  unseen  Friend  is  either  not  omnipotent, 
or  that  his  forbearance  with  my  often  repeated  disobedience  will 
at  last  have  a  limit ; — and  what  is  that  limit  ?  May  not  death  at 
last  decide  this  struggle  ?  may  he  not  be  God's  permitted  minister, 
to  decide  it  against  me  ?  These  thoughts  do  not  imply  the  least 
unbelief  in  a  future  state;  that  was  not  the  anxious  question  of  the 
heathen,  as  all  their  mythology  proves :  but  it  was,  What  shall  I 


86 


OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


be,  in  that  state  ?  Some  ethereal  particle  in  me  may  mount  up 
and  enter  into  rest,  and  even  be  united  to  the  Divine  Essence ; — 
but  will  it  be  myself?  I  cannot  believe  that  I  shall  die,  in  the 
sense  in  which  all  the  things  about  me  die.  Whenever  I  feel  that 
I  am  at  all,  I  feel  that  I  am  immortal ;  I  may  lose  the  thought 
while  I  am  speculating ;  lean  never  lose  it  while  I  am  acting  and 
living.  But  this  is  the  point, — shall  good  or  evil,  shall  light  or 
darkness  be  that  to  which  I  am  united,  when  all  the  spiritual  ener- 
gies, by  which  I  seem  to  have  asserted  my  connection  with  some- 
thing better  than  myself,  shall  be  as  much  crushed  by  pain  and 
weakness  and  death,  the  great  consummation  of  them,  as  the  ener- 
gies by  which  I  eat,  and  drink,  and  walk  ?  The  Jews  were  taught 
to  experience  precisely  the  same  difficulty,  only  with  still  greater 
power  and  reality,  only  with  a  brighter  and  better  hope  as  to  its 
solution.  They  felt  in  themselves  this  struggle ;  but  then  taking 
hold  of  the  covenant,  with  Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob,  they  were 
able  to  believe  that  the  righteous  Lord  who  revealed  himself  to 
their  hearts  was  indeed  their  Lord,  and  would  be  so  for  ever  and 
ever ;  and  coming  with  the  appointed  sacrifice,  at  the  appointed 
time,  in  the  appointed  place,  to  the  appointed  priest,  they  were  able 
to  believe  that  that  covenant  had  not  been  destroyed  through  their 
iniquity ;  that  they  still  had  an  inheritance  in  the  King  of  their 
nation  ;  that  they  should  behold  his  face  in  righteousness  \  and  that 
when  his  glory  was  manifested  to  the  whole  earth,  they  should 
partake  in  it  Yet  it  was  a  hope  still ; — still  the  doubt  rested  upon 
their  minds,  and  at  times  would  gain  a  dreadful  ascendancy — Is  this 
evil  and  accursed  nature  which  belongs  to  me,  my  ownself  ?  Are 
not  its  evils  imputed  to  me  ?  Are  not  they  counted  a  part  of  me  1 
Will  not  death  destroy  that  nature ;  and  when  he  destroys  it,  shall 
I  be  spared  1  These  questions  must  have  occupied  men,  not  be- 
cause they  did  not  possess  the  light  which  lighteth  every  man  that 
cometh  into  the  world,  but  because  they  did  possess  it;— yea,  ac- 
cording to  the  degree  in  which  that  light  was  revealed  to  them,  or 
in  which  they  followed  it.  Surely  some  answer  was  needed  to 
them  ;  surely  it  is  a  mockery  to  say  that  the  light  itself  was  the 
answer.  If  we  accept  the  doctrine  of  Luther,  the  answer  is  clear 
and  intelligible.  TheWord  was  made  flesh  and  dwelt  among  us  ; 
in  this  flesh  He  passed  through  the  conflicts  and  trials  of  men  j  He 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


87 


died  a  real  death ;  He  brought  back  a  real  body  from  the  grave. 
This  was  the  voice  from  heaven  replying  to  the  voice  from  earth. 
The  man  asks,  "  What  ami;  am  I  to  account  myself  a  child  of  the 
light  or  a  child  of  the  darkness  V9  Christ  dying  and  rising  from 
the  dead,  declares  :  "  Thy  nature  is  accursed,  thy  person  is  justifi- 
ed ;  married  to  thy  evil  nature,  thou  art  sinful  and  under  the  curse ; 
claiming  thy  portion  in  me,  thou  art  holy,  and  righteous,  and  re- 
deemed." Is  this  merely  the  doctrine  of  an  indwelling  Word  1 
Does  it  contradict  that  doctrine  ?  Or  does  one  prove  the  necessity 
and  the  reality  of  the  other? 

It  is  most  true,  however,  as  I  have  said  already,  that  there  is 
one  side  or  aspect  of  the  Lutheran  doctrine,  to  which  there  is 
nothing  corresponding  in  the  mystical.  The  outward  acts  of  our 
Lord  in  human  flesh,  considered  as  assertions  of  the  right  which 
creatures  bearing  that  flesh  have  to  rise  above  themselves  and 
claim  a  portion  in  Him,  have  been  recognised  by  many  an  earnest 
mystic  in  his  later  years,  as  most  needful  portions  of  a  spiritual 
economy.  But  the  feeling  which  was  at  the  root  of  all  others  in 
Luther's  mind,  that  these  acts  were  mediatorial,  propitiatory  acts, 
having  for  their  ultimate  object  the  satisfaction  of  the  will  of  the 
Father,  has  been  generally  received  by  persons  of  this  temper  with 
coldness,  if  not  with  disgust.  It  should,  I  think,  be  distinctly  under- 
stood by  them  at  first — for  they  must  arrive  at  the  discovery  sooner  or 
later — that  they  cannot  hope  to  connect  this  faith  with,  or  to  reduce 
it  under  any  of  the  ideas  which  belong  properly  to  mysticism.  If 
those  ideas  do  include  all  truth,  the  Lutheran  doctrine  is  not  true, 
for  the  very  assumption  upon  which  it  proceeds,  and  to  which 
every  thing  is  referred  that  there  is  an  Absolute  Will  which  is  the 
ground  of  all  things,  of  all  being,  life,  thought,  forms  no  part  of 
mysticism,  however  mystics  may  have  adopted  or  grafted  it  into 
their  faith.  The  Divine  Word  is  the  only  real  subject  of  their  me- 
ditation ;  a  vague  gulf  of  being  beyond  they  may  awfully  think 
of,  but  they  dare  not  speak  of  it  in  the  forms  of  human  language, 
or  bring  it  within  the  region  of  personality,  or  dream  of  it  as  the 
ground  of  human  relations.  Now  that  the  mystics  have  most  rea- 
sonable complaints  to  make  against  the  systems  to  which  the 
Lutheran  theology  has  given  rise,  on  this  very  ground,  that  they 
have  despoiled  the  idea  of  God  of  its  fearfulness  and  grandeur,  and 


88 


OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


reduced  it  under  human  notions  and  experience,  I  shall  be  presently 
obliged  to  admit  But  the  question  here  at  issue  is — Does  or  does  not 
evidence,  similar  to  that  which  compelled  us  to  acknowledge  the 
truth  of  the  mystical  idea  of  an  indwelling  Word,  compel  us  to 
acknowledge,  that  there  is  a  truth  beside  and  beyond  this,  which 
involves,  under  some  terms  or  other,  the  belief  of  Mediation,  Sacri- 
fice, Satisfaction  ?  Supposing,  for  instance,  we  attached  any  value 
to  the  discovery,  that  the  doctrine  of  a  Divine  Indwelling  Word 
was  not  merely  asserted  in  certain  detached  texts  of  Scripture,  but 
that  it  imparted  a  coherency  and  clearness  to  the  whole  course  of 
Scripture  history,  giving  a  sense  to  the  word  Idolatry,  showing 
how  and  why  that  was  treated  as  the  sin  of  mankind,  explaining 
the  lives  and  language  of  those  who  kept  themselves  free  from  it, 
— may  we  not  observe  a  parallel  line  of  proofs  bearing  just  as 
strongly  in  favour  of  these,  other  principles?  Is  the  Lutheran 
obliged  to  depend  upon  certain  words  or  texts,  in  order  to  show 
that  the  idea  of  human  Mediation  is  contained  in  Scripture  1  Is  it 
not  worked  into  the  very  tissue  of  the  history  which  the  Scripture 
contains  1  Is  it  not  involved  in  the  constitution  of  the  Jewish 
commonwealth,  which  it  treats  of  ?  Can  less  be  said  concerning 
the  kindred  ideas  of  Propitiation,  Atonement,  Sacrifice  1  May  it 
not  be  more  correctly  affirmed,  that  what  gives  the  sense  of  con- 
tinuousness  and  unity  to  the  books  of  Scripture,  written  under  so 
many  different  circumstances,  and  at  such  wide  intervals  of  time,  is 
this  fact,  that  lawgivers,  psalmists,  prophets,  are,  one  and  all, 
according  to  their  various  functions,  in  obedience  to  their  inward 
promptings,  and  to  meet  the  necessities  of  their  respective  times, 
gradually  drawing  out  these  ideas  which  were  already  embodied  in 
the  institutions  and  life  of  the  Jewish  nation  ? 

If,  again,  it  seemed  to  us  a  remarkable  witness  in  favour  of 
Fox's  principle,  that  one  great  portion  of  Gentile  records  was 
scarcely  intelligible  without  it ;  have  we  no  witness  in  favour  of 
these  principles  from  another  part  of  those  same  records  ?  The 
philosopher  discovered  a  divine  light,  or  wisdom,  which  he  was  to 
cry  after  and  to  follow ;  did  not  the  whole  body  of  the  people 
believe  that  there  was  an  invisible  power,  which  it  was  to  propi- 
tiate, which  it  was  to  reach  by  mediation,  to  which  it  must  offer 
sacrifices  1    Did  not  the  wisest  statesmen,  even  in  days  when  all 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


89 


actual  faith  had  disappeared,  still  recognise  these  thoughts  as 
strange  and  mysterious,  which  the  nation  must  acknowledge  if  it 
were  to  be  a  nation,  though  they  might  dispense  with  them  or  over- 
look them  ?  Was  philosophy  ever  able  to  get  above  these  ideas, 
or  to  merge  them  in  that  which  was  peculiarly  its  own  ?  Many 
philosophers  laboured  hard  ;  the  best  of  them  felt  more  strongly 
than  all  others,  that  there  was  in  the  popular  faith  upon  these 
matters,  that  which  contradicted  truths  which  seemed  to  him  most 
sacred  ;  yet  he  was  the  least  disposed  to  attack  that  faith ;  the 
most  inclined  to  recognise  it  as  something  which  the  philosopher 
needed  so  much  the  more,  because  he  was  a  philosopher. 

In  this  view  of  the  subject  he  was,  as  I  have  hinted  before, 
almost  peculiar ;  nearly  all  others  wished  either  to  extinguish  the 
existing  theology  'by  philosophical  notions,  to  translate  it  into 
philosophical  notions,  or  to  invest  philosophy  with  the  mysterious 
and  miraculous  character  of  revealed  theology.  The  records 
of  each  experiment  are  preserved,  the  more  they  are  studied  the 
better.  The  fact  has  survived  them  all — these  ideas  in  one  form 
or  another  have  been  and  are  the  most  characteristic  and  funda- 
mental ideas  of  humanity ;  the  very  proofs  and  witnesses  that  we 
constitute  a  Kind.  Explain  them  as  you  will  or  as  you  can,  but 
remember  that  an  explanation  is  not  the  thing.  If  these  ideas  be 
not  delusions,  there  is  some  reality  corresponding  to  them ;  and 
that  reality,  could  we  know  it,  might  be  expected  to  contain  the 
explanation  of  them,  and  also  of  the  partial,  false,  and  mischievous 
notions  which  may  have  encompassed  them;  if  they  be  delusions, 
it  would  seem  that  all  humanity  must  be  a  delusion  ;  that  there  can 
be  no  common  principles  to  form  the  groundwork  of  it.  I  cannot 
think,  then,  that  the  mystical  objection  to  the  Lutheran  doctrine, 
on  whichever  side  we  view  it,  is  a  tenable  one.  ^ 

2.  Another  class  of  persons,  who  oppose  the  doctrine  of  justifi- 
cation, as  it  was  stated  by  Luther,  maintain  that  it  exaggerates  a 
mere  fact  or  crisis  in  the  history  of  individuals,  into  a  fixed  and 
permanent  law.  "  At  a  certain  period,"  they  say,  "  a  man,  who 
has  been  careless  of  religion,  acquires  a  conviction  of  his  error. 
He  is  sensible  that  he  has  been  leading  a  faithless,  godless  life- 
He  has  been  acting  as  if  there  were  no  Lord  and  Saviour  whom  he 
was  meant  to  trust  and  to  love.    He  begins  to  recognise  such  a 


90 


OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


Saviour — to  believe  in  Him.  It  is  unquestionably  a  new  feeling  ; 
the  beginning  of  a  different  class  of  feelings  from  any  of  which  he 
has  hitherto  been  conscious.  It  is,  therefore,  invested  by  him,  and 
rightly,  with  great  sacredness ;  but  it  is  only  the  first  in  a  series 
of  spiritual  acts.  His  belief,  if  it  be  not  stunted  by  the  notion  that 
it  is  all-sufficient,  grows  into  love  and  good  works.  And  this  it 
might  have  done  if  there  had  been  no  such  sudden  discovery  as 
that  to  which  he  gives  the  name  of  Justification.  From  his  bap- 
tism upward  he  might  have  led  a  faithful  and  pure  life ;  then  that 
baptism  would  be  just  as  rightly  and  reasonably  called  his  justifica- 
tion, as  that  primary  and  preliminary  act  of  conscious  faith.  Lu- 
ther," they  continue,  "  was  led  by  his  own  circumstances,  or  by 
those  of  his  age,  to  dwell  with  particular  delight  and  emphasis 
upon  the  transition-mom ent  of  his  spiritual  history ;  yet  even  he 
speaks  frequently  of  baptism,  as  if  that  was  entitled  to  the  credit  of  his 
justification  ;  it  is  evident  then  that  there  was  a  confusion  in  his  mind 
which,  though  it  might  not  unfit  him  for  an  active  reformer,  certainly- 
must  makes  us  suspicious  of  him  when  he  assumed  to  be  the  enun- 
ciator  of  a  great  principle.  And  every  thing  in  his  words,  and  the 
history  of  his  doctrine,  tends  to  heighten  that  suspicion.  For  why 
did  he  dwell  so  much  upon  a  formal  release  from  guilt,  and  a  formal 
imputation  of  righteousness  ?  Surely  it  is  a  real  deliverance  from 
sin,  and  a  real  righteousness  that  man  requires.  Give  the  best 
form  you  can  to  the  other  notion  ;  strip  it  of  the  fictitious  char- 
acter, in  which  it  must  be  offensive  both  to  God  and  man  ;  and 
still  it  can  only  point  to  some  feeling  on  our  part  of  a  position 
offered  to  us,  which  we  may,  if  we  please,  realize ;  and  then  to 
speak  of  that  position  as  something  independent  of  the  realiza- 
tion, while  yet  you  say  that  it  is  a  position  granted  to  faith,  and 
that  faith  is  the  realizing  principle,  is  to  give  us  shadows  for  sub- 
stances, a  dream  of  food  to  satisfy  our  hunger. 

1  have  stated  the  argument,  I  hope,  fairly,  avoiding  only  the 
use  of  one  or  two  favourite  phrases,*  which  have  become  catch- 
words, and,  I  believe,  embarass  the  minds  of  all,  on  either  side, 
who  resort  to  them.  I  at  once  acknowledge  the  great  plausibility 
of  the  statement,  the  admirable  piety  of  those,  who,  in  former  days 


♦  Such  as  "  forensic." 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED.  91 

or  of  late,  have  brought  it  forward,  and  the  difficulty  of  showing 
why  I  think  the  substance  of  it  to  be  fallacious,  without  seeming  to 
reject  portions  of  it  which  I  believe  to  be  both  true  and  important. 
I  think,  however,  that  by  at  once  going  to  the  heart  of  the  ques- 
tion, we  may  be  able  to  relieve  it  of  many  of  its  perplexities.  Every 
one  must  have  been  struck  with  these  words  of  St.  Paul  :  "  That 
I  may  be  found  in  hira,  not  having  my  own  righteousness,  which  is 
of  the  law,  but  that  which  is  by  the  faith  of  Christ ;  the  righteous- 
ness, that  is,  of  God  by  or  upon  faith,"  (inl  nlctEi).  What  is 
remarkable  in  these  words  is,  of  course,  their  connection.  St.  Paul 
is  speaking  of  some  very  high  attainment,  some  end  which  was  to 
be  the  consummation  of  all  his  strivings.  And  this  attainment, 
this  end,  is  what  1  Having  an  individual  righteousness  ?  No ;  but 
precisely  the  not  having  it.  The  highest  perfection  this  saint  and 
apostle  could  think  of,  one  which  he  could  not  dare  to  say  he  had 
achieved,  was  the  ceasing  to  be  any  thing  in  himself,  the  acknow- 
ledgment of  his  whole  moral  and  spiritual  life  and  being  as  in 
another. 

I  do  not  believe  that  the  excellent  men,  who  argue  against 
the  Lutheran  doctrine  upon  the  grounds  I  am  considering,  have 
the  least  difficulty  in  interpreting  this  passage.  I  do  not  fancy 
that  they  wish  to  explain  away  its  force.  On  the  contrary,  I  am 
quite  persuaded  they  would  say,  "  Certainly  this  is  one  of  the  para- 
doxes of  divinity  ;  but  it  is  a  paradox  upon  which  every  new  fact 
in  our  spiritual  history  throws  a  new  light ;  a  paradox  so  involved 
in  the  idea  of  Christianity,  nay,  in  the  idea  of  our  own  moral  con- 
stitution, that  there  are  few  persons  who  do  not  frequently  justify  it 
by  their  unconscious  expressions,  even  if  they  have  little  apparent 
insight  into  its  meaning.  Every  man  knows,  that  just  so  far  as  he 
contemplates  self  in  his  acts  as  an  object  for  gratulation,  so  far 
those  acts  are  contradictory,  and  that  just  so  far  as  he  can  renounce 
self,  and  look  upon  his  acts  as  beginning  and  terminating  in  an- 
other, just  so  far  he  has  fought  the  great  fight  of  life,  and  has 
attained  his  true  state."  Such  language  as  this  is  mcst  common 
in  writers  who  have  a  strong  dislike  to  Luther.  Let  us  look 
steadily  at  it  for  a  moment. 

It  is  admitted,  that  this  state  of  self-denial,  in  the  highest  and 
fullest  sense  of  the  words,  is  the  true  state  of  a  man ;  not  a  fantastic 


92  OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 

imaginary  state  at  all;  something  which  every  good  man  is  to 
desire  and  strive  after;  and  to  sorrow  because  his  vanity  and  pride 
continually  check  him  in  his  efforts  to  reach  it.  Assuredly  then  it 
ought  not  to  be  assumed,  that  there  is  something  necessarily  ficti- 
tious in  the  idea  of  abandoning  a  self-righteousness,  and  acquiring 
another  righteousness ;  there  is  a  sense  in  which  that  idea  is  not 
only  not  fictitious,  but  the  very  reverse  of  fictitious ;  the  deliverance 
from  the  perpetual  fictions  and  counterfeits  of  our  selfish  nature. 
Nor,  again,  can  it  be  maintained,  that  the  doctrine  of  renouncing 
our  righteousness,  and  receiving  another,  does  necessarily  belong 
to  one  stage — the  lowest  stage — of  a  man's  spiritual  progress  ;  it 
would  seem,  that  in  some  sense  it  appertained  to  the  very  highest 
stage  of  it.  "  But  then,  it  is  said,  this  cannot  be  the  Lutheran 
sense;  for  that  sense  is  as  clearly  as  language  can  describe  it  this 
— that  a  sinner,  a  man  pursuing  an  evil  course,  does  by  an  act  of 
faith,  in  the  righteousness  of  another,  become  a  righteous  and 
justified  man.  No  one,  not  wishing  to  pervert  and  confuse  things 
essentially  distinct,  nay  opposite,  can  identify  this  assertion  with 
one  which  evidently  relates  to  the  most  advanced  period  of  Chris- 
tian life  and  experience."  Now  let  it  be  remembered,  that  the 
especial  charge  against  Luther  is,  that  he  mistook  the  phenomena 
of  a  certain  crisis  in  our  life  for  a  fixed  law  applicable  to  the 
whole  of  it.  He  is  blamed  for  attaching  so  much  importance  to 
this  doctrine,  as  if  it  were  the  key  to  the  entire  meaning  of  a  man's 
spiritual  existence,  when  in  fact  it  merely  describes  the  first  con- 
scious feeling  of  such  an  existence.  May  we  not  fairly  suggest 
the  thought  to  the  objector,  that  possibly  he  may  be  falling  into 
this  very  error  himself,  and  mistaking  Luther  just  because  he  wras 
free  from  it  ?  May  there  not  be  a  law  which  is  expressly  the  law 
of  a  man's  being;  complete  conformity  to  which  is  his  perfection; 
but  which,  from  the  first  hour  of  his  life  to  the  last,  is  his  law ; 
which  does  not  depend  the  least  for  its  reality  upon  his  recognition 
of  it,  or  his  denial  of  it ;  which  will  judge  him  at  the  last  day ; 
and  which  must  not,  therefore,  be  concealed  from  him  at  any  time, 
but  be  announced  to  him  as  that  against  which  he  is  rebelling. 
May  not  this  law  be,  must  it  not  be,  if  St.  Paul's  words  are  to  be 
received  in  their  simple  sense,  the  law  of  union  with  another,  the 
law  of  self-renunciation  ?    Suppose  then  I  see  a  man  pursuing  an 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED*  93 

utterly  wrong  course — a  course  of  indulgence  in  the  most  ordinary 
sense  of  the  words  — have  I  not  right  to  say  to  him,  This  is  an  evil 
course ;  and  if  he  ask  me  why,  to  answer,  Because  it  is  a  course 
of  selfishness,  and  because  you  were  not  meant,  and  your  conscience 
tells  you  you  were  not  meant  to  be  selfish.    And  if  he  reply  to 
me,  as  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  he  will — "  But  how  can  I  be  other- 
wise ?  every  man  is  selfish ;  selfishness  is  our  nature,  and  our 
necessity  ;  God  made  us  so,  we  cannot  help  it,"  am  I  hindered 
from  asserting  God's  ways  against  man's  blasphemy  in  some  such 
words  as  these  ?    *  I  care  not  whether  you  call  selfishness  your 
nature  or  no ;  if  it  be,  your  nature  is  a  contradiction  and  a  lie,  for 
it  makes  you  do  that  which  you  cannot  do  without  being  at  war 
with  yourself.    If  that  be  your  nature,  then  you  are  not  meant  to 
live  according  to  your  nature,  but  to  rise  out  of  it — above  it. 
And  there  is  One  who  has  come  to  redeem  you  out  of  your  nature, 
and  to  unite  you  to  Himself.    In  Him  you  may  believe  and  live ; 
in  yourself  you  cannot."    In  saying  this,  I  have  preached  to  this 
sinful  man  the  Lutheran  doctrine  of  justification.  I  have  told  him  that 
there  is  a  state  belonging  to  him,  with  which  he  is  not  living  in 
accordance,  but  with  which  he  is  living  at  variance.    I  have  said, 
that  union  with  another  is  his  law  ;  separation  from  him,  his  trans- 
gression.   I  have  said,  that  that  union  is  not  a  natural,  but  a 
spiritual  one.    It  is  a  union  which  is  maintained  by  faith  ;  unbelief 
is  the  renunciation  of  it :  therefore  an  anomalous  sinful  condition. 
There  is  a  fiction  here  assuredly  ;  it  is  a  fiction  to  have  a  state  and 
not  to  enjoy  it ;  a  fiction  to  possess  the  conditions  of  a  spiritual 
being,  and  to  be  acting  as  if  these  conditions  did  not  exist.  But 
it  is  the  fiction  of  an  evil  world  ;  and  I  know  not  how  we  are  to 
get  rid  of  the  fiction  but  by  declaring  the  fact  to  which  it  is 
opposed. 

The  dream,  that  because  it  is  announced  as  a  fact  it  will  be  at 
once  received  as  a  fact,  that  there  will  not  be  a  fierce  conflict  with 
the  selfish  nature  before  it  can  be  acknowledged  at  all,  and  that 
these  struggles  will  not  be  repeated  every  day  of  a  man's  pilgrim- 
age through  an  evil  world,  was  certainly  not  Luther's  dream. 
Every  page  of  his  writings,  like  every  hour  of  his  life,  bears  wit- 
ness to  a  tremendous  struggle.  The  question  which  he  thought  to 
be  all-important,  was  this — Is  the  struggle  against  the  too  great 


94  OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 

proneness  of  the  evil  heart  to  believe  and  trust,  or  against  its 
reluctance  to  believe  and  trust  ;  against  its  over-eagerness  to 
cleave  to  its  Lord,  or  against  its  passion  for  a  selfish  independence? 

His  conviction  was,  that  when  he  distrusted  Christ  he  was  a 
bad  and  evil  man,  with  no  capacity  for  doing  any  right  or  good 
act.  To  trust  then  must  be  a  duty  ;  a  man  could  not  be  just  or 
righteous  who  did  not  trust ;  so  far  as  he  did  trust  he  must  be  so. 
If  he  were  asked  whether  nothing  must  precede  this  trust  and  give 
a  warrant  for  it,  he  would  have  answered  :  Assuredly  God's  word 
and  promise  must  precede  ;  the  declaration,  that  this  state  is  yours, 
must  be  your  warrant  for  claiming  it.  The  words  of  the  Bible 
generally,  the  assurance  of  baptism  to  you  particularly,  give  you 
the  right  to  believe.  To  seek  the  right  in  any  thing  else,  in  any 
outward  acts  or  inward  feeling  of  yours,  is  to  commit  a  contradic- 
tion ;  for  these  acts  and  feelings,  if  they  are  lawful  and  right,  are 
acts  and  feelings  which  imply  trust — are  expressions  of  trust.  A 
man's  repetition  of  his  Credo  does  not  give  him  a  right  to  trust  in 
God's  mercy  and  forgiveness,  but  if  he  repeats  it,  as  he  should,  it 
is  a  form  of  trust  and  affiance  in  God.  A  man's  comfortable 
impressions  and  feelings  are  not  reasons  of  confidence  ;  if  they  are 
not  mere  physical  sensations,  they  are  the  effects  of  his  resting  in 
his  true  friend.  Faith  then,  according  to  him,  could  not  be  looked 
upon  as  a  grace,  which  we  may  contemplate  and  reflect  upon  in 
ourselves.  By  its  very  nature  it  is  the  act  of  going  out  of  self,  the 
act  of  entering  into  union  with  another  from  whom  all  our  graces 
are  to  be  derived.  That  the  power  of  performing  such  an  act  is 
conferred  by  God,  and  is  therefore  a  grace,  he  of  course  asserted 
stoutly  ;  but  it  made  an  immeasurable  difference  whether  the  grace 
was  supposed  to  be  given  to  a  man  as  so  much  stock  which  he 
might  call  his  own,  or  whether  its  effect  was  to  induce  him  to 
disclaim  all  property  in  himself,  and  to  live  entirely  in  Christ.  It 
wTas  on  this  account  that  he  resisted  so  strongly  the  argument 
wrhich  the  Romanists  deduced  from  the  relative  excellence  of  faith 
and  love.  Love,  they  said,  is  a  higher  grace  than  faith,  by  the 
testimony  of  your  own  St.  Paul,  and  yet  you  make  the  grace  of 
faith  and  not  of  love  the  ground  of  justification.  I  do  not,  he 
would  answer,  make  what  you  would  call  the  grace  of  faith  the 
ground  of  justification.    I  do  not  tell  a  man  that  he  is  to  ask  him- 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


95 


self,  how  much  faith  he  has,  and  if  he  have  so  much,  to  call  himself 
justified.  What  I  tell  him  is  precisely  that  he  is  not  to  do  this, 
that  this  is  the  very  trick  which  he  has  been  practising  upon  him- 
self, while  he  has  been  under  your  teaching.  He  is  not  to  think  or 
speculate  about  his  faith  at  all.  He  is  to  believe,  and  by  believing, 
to  lose  sight  of  himself  and  to  forget  himself.  And,  therefore,  I 
cannot  allow  that  he  is  justified  by  his  grace  of  love,  though  I 
admit  that  to  be  the  highest  of  all  graces.  Trust  is  the  beginning 
of  love,  the  way  to  love.  A  being  who  shows  that  he  cares  for 
me,  and  in  whom  all  love  dwells,  proposes  himself  to  me  as  an 
object  of  my  trust ;  I  trust  him,  and  so  enter  into  a  knowledge  and 
participation  of  his  love.  And  that  love  works  in  me  to  will  and 
to  do  of  his  good  pleasure. 

I  do  not  say  that  on  all  these  points  Luther  may  not  have  fallen 
into  a  hundred  inconsistencies.  Those  who  search  his  writings 
for  such  inconsistencies  will,  I  doubt  not,  be  amply  rewarded  for 
their  pains.  Those  who  look  in  him  for  a  strong,  steady  current 
of  thought  and  meaning  running  through  all  his  perplexities  and 
contradictions,  and  often  made  more  evident  by  them,  will  also,  I 
think,  find  what  they  desire.  One  remark  I  would  venture  to 
make  in  support  of  the  view  which  I  have  taken  of  his  theology. 
It  is  certainly  a  rare  case  that  the  character  of  the  doctrine  which 
a  man  spends  his  life  in  proclaiming,  should  stand  out  in  direct 
contrast  to  his  own  personal  character.  In  nearly  all  cases  one 
receives  some  strong  impression  and  colouring  from  the  other. 
Those  who  read  Luther's  history,  would  certainly  not  expect  to 
find  an  exception  to  this  rule  in  his  case  ;  they  would  fancy  that 
he  must  have  thrown  more  of  his  own  personality  than  another 
man  does  into  any  principle  he  defended — not  less.  Now  Luther 
is  often  condemned  as  coarse,  rude,  impatient ;  did  ever  any  one 
affirm  that  he  was  not  sufficiently  plain-spoken  and  substantial  ? 
Is  there  not  then  a  rather  strong  a  priori  improbability  in  the 
notion,  that  his  doctrine,  to  whatever  charges  it  may  be  open,  is 
obnoxious  to  just  this  one,  of  being  a  mere  pursuing  or  fight- 
ing of  shadows  ?  Might  not  one  be  glad  to  discover  some 
escape  from  a  supposition  which,  to  any  ordinary  person  who 
is  not  a  theologian,  must  seem  most  utterly  startling  and  inex- 
plicable ? 


N 


96  OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 

3.  When  I  have  mentioned  one  other  objection  to  this  principle, 
I  believe  I  shall  have  encountered  all  those  by  which  persons  in 
this  day  are  likely  to  be  perplexed.  Many  students  are  at  a  loss 
to  discover  how  the  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  differs  from 
the  general  doctrine  of  atonement,  which  wras  as  strongly  recog- 
nised, in  words  at  least,  by  the  Romanists  as  it  could  be  by  Luther. 

We  can  understand,  they  say,  that  many  practices  may  have 
been  sanctioned  at  that  time,  which  interfered  w7ith  the  full 
acknowledgment  of  our  Lord's  sacrifice.  We  can  suppose  that 
it  may  have  been  important  to  reassert  the  principle  strongly  for 
the  purpose  of  protesting  against  these  abuses.  But  the  doctrine 
was  there ;  the  Romanists  insisted  upon  faith  in  it ;  what  more 
have  we  to  do  1  If  Protestantism  have  got  rid  of  any  mischievous 
outgrowths  of  the  elder  system,  let  us  be  thankful ;  but  why  endea- 
vour to  maintain  this  particular  mode  of  expression  which  was,  to 
all  appearance,  adopted  for  a  temporary  purpose — and  has  accom- 
plished that  purpose  1 

I  think  that  the  statement  I  have  given  of  Luther's  doctrine  is, 
to  a  certain  extent,  an  answer  to  this  difficulty.  He  did  not  call 
upon  men  to  acknowledge  either  a  new  doctrine  or  an  old  one,  to 
believe  either  in  a  certain  opinion  concerning  justification  or  in  a  cer- 
tain opinion  concerning  the  atonement.  He  called  upon  them  to  be- 
lieve in  God  the  Father  Almighty — in  Jesus  Christ  his  only  Son 
our  Lord,  and  in  the  Holy  Ghost. — He  said  again  and  again,  that 
the  Credo  was  justification.  He  told  men  that  union  with  Christ 
was  deliverance  from  sin  and  condemnation  \  that  that  union  was 
claimed  and  maintained  by  faith ;  that  faith  was  therefore  justifi- 
cation. Such  an  assertion  wTas  true  or  false.  If  it  were  true,  it 
cannot  have  ceased  to  be  true  ;  all  the  circumstances  and  occasions 
which  called  it  forth  may  have  passed  away ;  but  the  law  which 
it  proclaimed  must  be  as  much  a  law  for  us  as  it  was  for  those  to 
whom  Tetzel  sold  his  indulgences.  And  so  far  from  thinking,  as 
those  who  make  this  objection  seem  to  think,  that  we  of  this  day 
can  afford  to  substitute  faith  in  a  certain  notion  or  dogma,  for  faith 
in  a  living  person,  though  the  men  of  the  16th  century  could 
not,  I  rather  fancy  that  this  is  a  temptation  to  which  we  have 
yielded  more  than  even  the  Romanist  did,  and  from  which  we  al- 
most need  a  second  Reformation  to  deliver  us. 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


97 


But  I  do  not  believe  that  the  objection  really' means  this ;  I  sus- 
pect that  this  difficulty  about  the  relation  between  the  idea  of 
justification  and  the  idea  of  atonement  is  a  very  important  difficulty 
indeed ;  that  it  is  one  which  did  not  force  itself  upon  the  con- 
sideration of  the  Reformers;  that  it  is  one  which  does  force  itself 
upon  our  consideration ;  that  people  are  taking  various  methods 
of  expressing  it  to  themselves — some  of  them  being  very  confused 
methods  tending  to  increase  rather  than  to  remove  our  perplexity, 
and  to  rob  us  of  distinctions  and  principles  which  with  great  diffi- 
culty have  been  established  for  us ;  but  that  it  must  be  earnestly 
considered,  and  will  receive  some  practical  resolution — a  very  mis- 
chievous if  not  a  very  satisfactory  one. — The  question  is  this. 
Can  this  doctrine  of  justification,  if  it  retain  its  Lutheran  meaning, 
if  it  be  the  assertion  of  a  man's  personal  position  and  personal  duty, 
if  it  do  not  degenerate  into  the  most  lifeless  of  all  formulas — as- 
sume the  position  which  it  does  assume  in  a  great  part  of  our  Pro- 
testant divinity  ?  Can  it  be  put  forward  as  the  truth  which  lies  at 
the  foundation  of  the  Christian  Church?  Does  this  view  honour 
the  docrine,  or  only  kiss  it,  in  order  to  kill  ?  This  is  a  question 
which  we  shall  have  to  consider  when  we  inquire  into  the  Pro- 
testant systems,  and  their  practical  workings.  Perhaps  the  reader 
may  be  the  less  unwilling  to  enter  with  me  upon  the  examination, 
if  he  perceive,  as  I  hope  by  this  time  he  does,  that  it  is  as  much  my 
desire  as  it  can  be  his,  to  assert  the  principle  in  its  integrity  and 
fulness. 

II.  1.  It  is  evident  that  the  mystics,  who  oppose  themselves 
mainly  to  that  side  of  the  doctrine  of  justification  which  connects 
it  with  the  idea  of  the  Divine  Will,  must  dislike  to  see  that  idea  so 
prominently  exhibited  as  it  is  in  the  Calvinistical  theology.  And 
it  is  not  difficult  to  understand,  from  the  style  of  their  previous  ar- 
guments, what  kind  of  substitute  they  would  be  inclined  to  offer  for 
the  doctrine  of  Election,  as  it  appears  in  that  theology.  "  Each 
man,  they  say,  stands  in  a  certain  relation  to  the  light  and  to  the 
darkness;  following  the  light,  and  submitting  to  the  Divine  Word, 
he  enters  into  an  elect  state ;  preferring  the  darkness  he  becomes 
reprobate.  In  the  first  case  he  acts  according  to  the  purpose  of 
God  ;  in  the  second  he  resists  it.  But  because  this  is  the  case, 
man  is  not  therefore  to  be  spoken  of  as  the  author  of  his  own  sal- 

7 


98 


OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


ration ;  the  nature  of  the  act  which  he  performs,  proves  that  he  is 
not  so  ;  it  may  be  more  properly  called  an  act  of  submission  than 
of  choice,  though  it  involve  choice  ;  it  is  the  surrender  of  his  own 
will ;  whereas  the  opposite  kind  of  act  is  emphatically  the  asser- 
tion of  his  own  will,  a  declaration  of  independence." 

I  have  already  recognised  so  strongly  the  principle  which  this 
statement  embodies,  that  I  am  not  likely  to  make  any  exception 
against  it.  I  receive  it  as  a  satisfactory  explanation  of  the  practi- 
cal conditions  under  which  every  man  acts ;  conditions  which 
must  remain  true,  whatever  other  truth  there  may  be  involved  in 
them.  The  only  question  is,  whether  this  doctrine,  respecting  the 
Divine  Word,  can  set  aside,  or  make  unnecessary,  the  distinct 
formal  belief  of  a  primary,  absolute,  or  original  Will  ?  I  have  al- 
ready said  that  I  think  it  cannot.  That  belief  seems  to  lie  deeper 
than  the  one  respecting  our  relation  to  the  Divine  Word,  and  to  be 
the  necessary  ground  of  it.  Take  away  that  ground,  and  I  cannot 
see  that  we  retain  any  acknowledgment  of  God  in  himself;  that 
we  contemplate  Him  otherwise  than  in  reference  to  us,  or  his  opera- 
tions upon  us.  The  mystical  doctrine  may  explain  the  position  and 
circumstances  of  man;  but  these  very  circumstances,  if  the  doctrine 
be  true,  imply  a  theology,  and  that  theology  it  seems  to  me  is 
the  very  thing  which  mysticism  wants. 

2.  Again,  the  class  of  persons  who  complain  of  the 
Lutheran  doctrine  of  justification,  as  leading  to  the  belief  Qf  a  fic- 
titious righteousness,  see  in  the  doctrine  of  election  an  arbitrary 
dispensation  with  all  righteousness.  "  A  person  receives  eternal 
life  because  it  is  the  good  pleasure  of  God  that  he  should  receive 
it.  Supposing  we  grant  that  the  obedience  is  decreed,  as  well  as 
the  reward  of  it,  yet  where  is  that  which  is  the  essence  of  all 
obedience,  that  can  be  acceptable  to  a  perfect  being,  Freedom  ? 
You  cannot,  therefore,  make  the  doctrine  reasonable,  except  by 
admitting  Divine  election  to  be  the  foresight  of  human  obedi- 
ence." 

Unquestionably  I  would  admit  that  proposition,  or  any  other, 
were  it  never  so  startling,  rather  than  acknowledge  that  great 
primary  contradiction,  that  the  source  of  all  being  is  self-\\\l\. 
But  one  contradiction  is  not  the  escape  from  another,  and  assuredly 
the  idea  of  an  obedience  in  man,  which  has  no  ground  to  rest 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


99 


upon ;  which  was  foreseen  by  God,  but  not  derived  from  Him ;  of 
something  good,  therefore,  which  cannot  be  traced  ultimately  to  the 
Fountain  of  good  ;  nay,  which  exists  independently  of  it,  that  is 
to  say,  under  what  we  are  wont  to  consider  the  very  condition  of 
evil — is  a  most  agonizing  contradiction.  And  what  need  have  we 
of  it  ?  Only  do  not  suppose  the  Being  whom  you  worship  to  be  a 
mere  power ;  only  acknowledge  him  to  be  that  in  reality  which 
you  say  in  words  that  He  is,  the  essential  truth  and  goodness ;  only 
suppose  the  absolute  will  to  be  a  will  to  good,  and  how  can  we 
imagine  that  Happiness,  Obedience,  Freedom,  have  their  origin  any 
where  but  in  Him  ;  that  misery,  disobedience,  slavery,  mean  any- 
thing but  revolt  and  separation  from  Him  ? 

3.  The  last  complaint  against  the  doctrine  runs  parallel  with 
the  last  against  Luther's.  Does  not  the  election  mean  the  election 
of  a  body  ?  Has  it  any  thing  to  do  with  the  election  of  individuals  ? 
I  would  make  the  same  answer  here  which  I  made  in  the  other 
case.  Every  individual  man  must  be  in  some  state  or  other. 
Every  individual  man  ought  to  know  to  whom  he  is  to  ascribe 
that  state  in  which  he  is.  The  Reformers  were  especially  deal- 
ing with  the  circumstances  of  individual  men.  They  meant  to 
explain  to  whom  each  individual  should  attribute  his  election.  But 
what  the  true  state  of  each  man  is ;  in  what  relation  each  man 
stands  to  a  body ;  whether  the  election  of  an  individual  can  be 
viewed  apart  from  the  Election  of  the  Church  ;  these  are  questions 
which  are  forced  upon  us  at  this  time,  and  which  it  is  possible  may 
be  resolved  in  a  way  in  which  some  of  the  Reformers  and  most  of 
their  disciples  would  not  have  resolved  them. 

HI.  1.  The  language  of  the  Reformers  respecting  the  Bible 
was  probably  more  offensive  to  the  Quakers  and  the  mystics  gen- 
erally, than  even  their  doctrines  of  justification  and  election.  The 
notion  of  a  book  to  which  men,  possessing  the  Inward  Light  and 
guided  by  the  Spirit,  must  defer  as  an  absolute  authority,  puzzled 
and  confused  them.  Nevertheless,  they  were  by  no  means  inclined 
to  deny,  that  the  more  they  were  walking  in  the  Light  and  sub- 
mitting to  the  Spirit,  the  more  sympathy  they  had  with  the  words 
of  this  book,  the  less  they  were  disposed  to  cavil  at  them.  In  this, 
therefore,  as  in  the  two  former  cases,  they  were  inclined  to  trans- 
late the  language  of  the  Reformers  into  their  own,  and  to 


100 


■OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


affirm  that  in  any  other  sense  except  that  it  was  false.  The  spiritual 
man  had  a  capacity  for  discerning  spiritual  truths  under  the  letter 
of  the  Scriptures ;  to  him,  therefore,  they  had  a  meaning  and  an 
exceeding  value.  But  to  call  them  in  themselves,  as  words,  as  re- 
cords of  facts,  divine ;  to  hold  them  up,  in  this  character,  as  objects 
of  reverence,  was  to  turn  men's  eyes  away  from  the  true  light,  and 
so  far  as  you  could  to  quench  it. 

The  truth  of  this  statement,  so  far  as  it  describes  the  faculty 
which  the  Scripture  addresses,  I  have  already  admitted,  and  have 
maintained  that  it  is  implicitly  recognised  by  those  who  seem  to 
be  most  startled  by  it.  That  all  revelation  is  to  the  conscience — 
the  inner  man,  and  that  when  that  conscience  is  not  awake,  when 
that  inner  man  is  buried,  the  revelation  is  not  really  made,  most 
persons,  under  some  form  of  language  or  other,  are  ready  to  con- 
fess. And  that  the  most  consistent  and  intelligible  interpretation 
of  this  truth  is  contained  in  the  doctrine,  that  man  is  created  for 
union  with  the  Living  Word,  and  that  except  in  union  with  Him, 
'he  is  not  in  a  true  living  state,  I  at  least  am  most  anxious  to  maintain. 
But  then  if  this  be  the  state,  not  for  one  man  but  for  all  men,  and 
if  each  man,  just  so  far  as  he  enters  into  his  true  state,  becomes 
more  of  a  man,  and  less  of  a  mere  individual,  does  it  not  seem 
strange  that  there  should  be  no  instrument  through  which  the  mind 
of  the  Living  Word  is  expressed  to  the  race,  and  wrhich  therefore 
overreaches  the  feelings  and  judgments  of  each  particular  mind, 
while  it  imparts  to  these  feelings  and  judgments  clearness,  purity, 
and  strength  ?  Does  not  the  expectation  of  such  an  instrument,  a 
certain  conviction,  that  it  is  necessary  and  that  it  will  be  given, 
grow  up  just  in  proportion  as  we  take  in  the  other  idea,  and  ob- 
serve how  entirely  it  contradicts  the  notion  that  each  man  is  a  law 
to  himself?  Now  supposing  there  were  such  an  instrument,  of 
what  kind  must  it  be  ?  You  say  that  the  same  set  of  facts,  words, 
records,  conveys  a  different  meaning  to  the  spiritual  and  enlight- 
ened man  and  to  the  fleshly  ignorant  man.  Be  it  so — then  what 
is  there  to  prevent  us  from  believing  that  the  truth  which  is  meant 
to  be  conveyed,  should  be  conveyed  in  facts,  records,  and  words? 
Why  may  it  not  be  a  spiritual  communication,  because  it  is  em- 
bodied in  the  ordinary  forms  of  human  discourse  ?  Can  you  imagine 
how  it  should  be  embodied  in  any  other  forms  ?    That  you  may 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


not  be  able  to  conjecture  what  facts  and  events  would  be  adequate 
to  make  known  to  man  the  law  of  his  own  being,  his  relation  to 
God,  the  character  of  God,  I  willingly  acknowledge.  But  suppose 
you  were  told  that  a  set  of  men — a  peculiar  nation — had  been 
selected  as  the  organs  of  a  divine  communication  to  the  nations 
generally,  and  that  all  their  circumstances  had  been  contrived  for 
the  purpose  of  fitting  them  for  such  a  function,  would  you  say 
there  was  a  jmori  improbability  that  this  would  be  the  method 
adopted  by  the  Lord  of  man  for  speaking  to  his  creatures  ?  would 
you  not  feel  there  was  a  singular  fitness  in  it ;  that  there  was  some 
difficulty  in  conjecturing  how  any  other  could  be  equally  in  accor- 
dance with  the  principle  which  we  have  acknowledged  ? 

Whence,  then,  comes  the  reluctance  of  the  mystic  to  receive 
the  reformed  doctrine  on  this  subject  1  It  may  be  traced,  I  believe, 
to  the  same  defect  which  we  have  observed  in  him  already.  He 
perceives  the  conditions  under  which  man  exists,  the  relation  in 
which  he  stands  to  a  divine  guide  and  teacher,  but  he  does  not 
trace  that  relation  up  to  its  ground  in  an  Originating  Will.  Stop- 
ping short  of  that,  he  cannot,  it  seems  to  me,  heartily  believe  in  a 
Revelation.  He  thinks  of  the  eye  which  receives  the  Light ;  he 
cannot  steadily  reflect  that  there  was  a  Light  before  the  eye,  and 
that  it  called  into  existence  the  eye  which  should  behold  it.  I  do 
not  say  that  he  does  not  implicitly  acknowledge  this  truth.  But 
the  explicit  acknowledegment  of  it  is  that  which  I  believe  gave 
the  Reformation  all  its  moral  strength  and  grandeur,  and  above 
all,  which  imparted  to  the  Protestant  doctrine  respecting  the  Bible 
all  its  meaning. 

2.  The  Quaker  complains  against  this  doctrine  because  it  sub- 
jects the  spiritual  man  to  the  government  of  words  and  letters.  A 
much  more  popular  objection  to  it  is,  that  it  sets  particular  men, 
however  ill  taught  and  undisciplined,  free  from  all  authority  but 
their  own.  "  Interpretations  of  Scripture  have  been  compiled  by 
a  series  of  wise,  learned,  holy  men  ;  some  of  them  receiving  their 
lessons  immediately  from  the  apostles.  Evidently,  therefore,  there 
are  difficulties,  amazing  difficulties,  about  its  meaning.  Yet  the 
most  ignorant  mechanic  is  to  be  treated  as  if  he  could  take  cog- 
nizance of  it,  and  attain  to  a  complete  understanding  of  it." 

Now  it  should  be  understood  or  remembered,  that  however  the 


102 


OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 


doctrine  of  the  Reformers  respecting  the  Scriptures  may  have  be- 
come identified  with  the  doctrine  of  private  judgment,  it  did  not 
present  itself  to  them  in  that  form,  but  in  the  most  dissimilar  form 
imaginable.  They  expressly  proclaimed  the  Bible  to  be  that  book 
which  puts  down  and  humbles  private  judgments ;  which  asserts 
its  claim  to  be  heard  above  them  all  and  in  opposition  to  them  all, 
and  which  is  able  to  make  that  claim  good.  They  believed  that 
its  words  were  with  power ;  that  when  it  spoke,  man  felt  that 
power,  and  either  submitted  to  it  or  consciously  rebelled  against  it. 
I  appeal  to  any  one  who  has  looked  at  all  into  the  writings  of  the 
Reformers,  whether  this  be  not  the  tone  which  habitually  pervades 
them.  Was  this  notion  of  theirs  absurd  or  extravagant  ?  As- 
suredly it  might  have  been  justified — it  was  justified  to  the  men 
who  lived  at  what  is  called  the  revival  of  letters — by  the  most 
obvious  analogies.  Was  it  the  fact  that  the  men  and  women  and 
children  in  the  Greek  isles  and  on  the  shores  of  Asia  had  heard  the 
Homeric  songs  from  the  lips  of  wandering  rhapsodists,  and  had 
received  them  into  their  memories  and  their  hearts  ?  Was  it  the 
fact  that  in  the  most  cultivated  period  of  Athenian  life  these  same 
songs  were  listened  to,  with  less  of  genuine  admiration  perhaps, 
but  still  with  delight  and  a  confession  of  their  strange  power  1 
Was  it  the  fact  that  afterwards  they  became  subjects  of  philoso- 
phical speculation  to  Aristotle,  but  at  the  self-same  moment  stirred 
the  spirit  of  Alexander  to  the  invasion  of  the  East — without  any 
reference  to  his  master's  criticisms  upon  them  ?  Did  English  or 
German  schoolboys  wait  till  they  had  studied  Aristotle  or  Eustathius 
to  feel  them — nay  in  the  best  sense  to  understand  them — in  their 
first  dress  or  in  their  own  tongue  ?  What  man  in  his  senses  will 
say  that  there  was  any  arrogance  of  private  interpretation  in  all 
this ;  that  it  was  the  setting  up  a  right  to  criticise,  and  not  much 
rather  the  abandonment  of  all  such  right  in  submission  to  an  in- 
fluence which  could  not  be  resisted  1  Were  the  Ionian  women 
and  children,  the  Macedonian  prince,  the  English  schoolboys,  dis- 
paraging the  labours  of  Aristotle  or  Eustathius ;  were  they  not 
affording  the  best  justification  of  them  ? 

All  then  that  the  Reformers  said  when  they  claimed  the  Bible 
for  peasants  was  this — that  if  it  pleased  God  to  make  himself 
known  to  his  creatures,  and  if  this  book  contained  the  records  of 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


103 


his  revelation,  it  was  not  more  strange  to  expect  that  his  power 
would  go  forth  to  carry  the  meaning  of  the  book  home  to  those 
for  whom  it  wTas  meant,  than  that  the  words  of  a  human  book 
should  be  able  to  make  themselves  intelligible ;  it  was  not  more 
necessary  that  the  peasants  of  Christendom  should  wrait  for  a  com- 
mentary before  they  opened  their  ears  and  hearts  to  receive  the 
wrords  of  the  one  book,  than  that  the  peasants  of  Greece  should 
wait  for  a  commentary  before  they  opened  their  ears  and  hearts  to 
receive  the  wrords  of  the  other.  This  was  their  notion,  which  did 
not,  however,  require  even  this  process  of  reasoning  for  its  con- 
firmation ;  seeing  that  they  had  evidence  before  their  eyes  that  the 
Bible  did  speak  to  poor  men,  and  did  make  itself  heard  by  them, 
the  more  in  proportion  as  it  was  more  directly  and  livingly  set 
before  them.  I  say  livingly,  for  we  must  not  impute  to  the  Re- 
formers the  opinion  that  the  power  of  the  book  wrould  be  felt  by 
the  mere  reader  of  it :  they  attached,  as  every  one  knows,  an  im- 
portance and  sacredness  to  the  office  of  the  preacher  which  we  are 
apt,  and  not  without  reason,  if  the  circumstances  of  our  own  day 
are  to  regulate  our  belief,  to  consider  extravagant. 

3.  There  is  however  another  side  to  this  objection.  The  doubt 
recurs  here,  as  in  the  other  cases — Is  this  power  promised  to  indivi- 
duals or  a  certain  body  1  Are  individuals  as  such  to  expect  that 
the  word  of  God  will  reveal  itself  to  their  hearts  and  consciences? 
And  the  former  answer  must  be  repeated.  Unquestionably  the 
Reformers  believed  that  the  wrord  was  to  each  man,  not  to  a  mere 
mass  of  men.  They  believed  that  the  Bible  had  its  peculiar  lesson 
for  every  one,  and  not  merely  its  general  lesson  for  the  world. 
But  to  ascertain  how  the  peculiar  lesson  and  the  general  lesson 
bear  upon  each  other,  and  under  what  circumstances  and  condi- 
tions any  given  man  may  hope  to  profit  by  either,  we  must  know 
whether  he  is  in  his  true  state  when  he  is  living  in  a  certain  body 
or  when  he  is  standing  aloof  and  asserting  his  independence.  This 
is,  as  I  have  said  already,  a  very  important  question — perhaps  the 
question  for  us  in  this  day  to  decide.  A  kind  of  help  to  resolving 
it  may  perhaps  be  obtained  from  the  comparison  which  I  first  used 
in  defence  of  the  Reformers.  The  Homeric  poems  were  sung  to 
Greek  women  and  children.  They  were  received  and  loved  by 
them  because  they  had  Greek  sympathies :  we  receive  and  love 


104  OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  PRINCIPLES 

them  because  we,  being  members  of  a  nation,  are  able  to  enter 
into  those  sympathies.  Whether  a  set  of  savages,  without  any 
sense  of  society,  could  have  listened  to  them  with  equal  rapture,  or 
with  any  rapture  at  all,  is  a  point  worth  considering.  But  this  is 
merely  a  hint  for  reflection ;  the  subject  must  receive  a  more  full 
consideration. 

IV.  I  believe  it  will  be  more  convenient  to  pass  over  for  the 
present  the  objections  which  are  made  to  the  doctrine  of  the  Re- 
formers, respecting  National  distinctions  and  the  power  of  Sove- 
reigns. Till  we  have  considered  many  topics  which  have  not  yet 
come  under  our  notice,  the  force  of  these  objections  could  not  be 
appreciated  ;  it  would  be  therefore  unfair  to  attempt  a  refutation 
of  them.  And  the  omission  is  of  less  importance,  as  we  shall  find, 
that  the  systems  to  which  the  Reformation  has  given  birth  have 
been  but  indirectly  affected  by  this  particular  tenet. 

One  remark  however  I  must  make,  which  is  necessary  in  order 
to  understand  the  contrast  which  I  have  attempted  to  exhibit  be- 
tween the  Quaker  tendency,  and  that  which  characterized  the 
Reformers.  I  said  that  the  assertion  of  an  Absolute  Will  was  the 
main  peculiarity  of  the  latter,  the  assertion  of  a  relation  between 
the  Divine  W7ord  and  his  creatures  of  the  former.  It  might  seem 
that  this  assertion  was  scarcely  consistent  with  another  which  I 
made,  (and  which  will  be  at  once  admitted  as  true,)  that  Luther 
delighted  to  realize  the  connection  of  our  Lord  with  all  human 
circumstances  and  relations,  and  that  Fox  turned  away  from  such 
contemplations  altogether.  But  a  minute's  thought  will  remove 
the  apparent  contradiction.  The  relation  between  the  Heart  and 
Spirit  of  man  and  its  Divine  Teacher,  wTas  the  one  which  the 
Quaker  perceived  :  to  connect  ordinary  human  relations  with  this 
seemed  to  him  impossible ;  it  was  almost  profanation.  The  Re- 
former, taking  his  stand  upon  the  ground  of  the  Divine  Will,  and 
looking  upon  the  Bible  as  containing  the  revelation  of  that  Will, 
had  no  such  delicate  feeling.  The  common  earth  was  God's  crea- 
tion. Kings,  fathers,  and  husbands  had  been  appointed  by  Him, 
and  wyere  spoken  of  in  his  word  ;  the  whole  economy  of  his  king- 
dom had  been  transacted  through  their  means.  The  Papists  had 
treated  the  world  as  ths  devil's  world,  with  their  "  touch  not,  taste 
not,  handle  not     but  there  was  no  safety  in  such  abstinence ;  the 


OF  THE  REFORMATION  CONSIDERED. 


]05 


security  was  in  serving  God  with  a  clean  heart,  and  giving  Him 
thanks  for  his  gifts.  Such  was  the  Reformation  feeling,  wherein 
we  must  perceive  indications  of  a  high  truth,  which  might  lead  to 
a  deliverance  from  sensuality  or  materialism,  or  might  be  perverted 
into  them.  This  was,  at  all  events,  the  immediate  effect  of  its 
proclamation.  The  Teutonic  nations,  in  which  family  life  had 
always  flourished,  and  in  which  the  King  had  been  able  to  assert 
his  position  as  something  distinct  from  that  of  the  premier  baron 
of  his  realm,  and  in  which  there  was  a  tendency  towards  business 
and  enterprise,  became  Protestant ;  the  Latin  nations,  in  which 
there  was  a  lower  standard  of  domestic  and  national  feeling,  but 
more  of  the  feeling  and  sympathies  which  dispose  to  general  social 
intercourse,  with  more  also,  as  I  think,  of  a  tendency  to  pure  con- 
templation, continued  to  call  themselves  Catholic. 


SECTION  in. 

PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 

While  I  have  maintained  that  the  Protestant  principles  are  in- 
separably connected,  and  that  all  are  implicitly  contained  in  the 
first,  I  have  hinted  also  that  they  presented  themselves  in  quite  dif- 
ferent aspects  and  relations  to  the  different  Reformers.  Justifica- 
tion was  the  central  thought  in  Luther's  mind,  Election  in  Calvin's, 
the  Authority  of  the  Scripture  in  Zuingle's;  the  Authority  of 
Sovereigns  in  all  the  political  patrons  of  Protestantism,  and  in  some 
of  its  theological  champions,  especially  here  in  England.  And  as 
these  differences  indicated  the  existence  of  different,  nay,  opposite, 
habits  of  mind  in  persons  who  bore  the  common  name  of  Protestants, 
(and  had  a  right  to  that  name,  not  only  as  being  all  opposed  to 
Romanism,  but  as  all  recognising  the  positive  doctrines  which 
Romanism  denied,)  so  it  portended  the  growth  of  immediate  divi- 
sions. 

I.  The  character  of  the  German  Reformation  is  mainly,  but  not 
wholly,  expressed  in  Martin  Luther;  most  students  feel,  that  in 
order  to  understand  it  fully,  we  must  connect  with  him,  at  all  events, 
Philip  Melancthon.    It  has  been  a  wonder  to  some  that  Luther, 


106 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


whose  language  against  the  teachers  of  the  Church,  not  only  in  his 
own  time,  but  in  past  times,  is  probably  more  vehement  than  that 
of  any  other  Protestant,  should  nevertheless  have  felt  so  much 
sympathy  with  the  man  who  was  least  disposed  to  commit  any  act 
of  separation  from  the  old  Church,  and  should  have  turned  away 
with  dislike  from  those  who  were  labouring  to  consolidate  a  Pro- 
testant System.  The  circumstance  is  undoubtedly  very  curious, 
and  cannot,  I  think,  be  explained  merely  by  the  influence  which  a 
man  of  calm  character  and  logical  intellect  is  wont  to  exercise 
over  one  of  ardent  temperament  and  practical  energy.  The  truth 
seems  to  be  this — Luther  believed  at  first,  and  believed  to  the  end 
of  his  life,  that  the  Creed  and  the  Sacraments  were  the  great  wit- 
nesses for  justification — if  it  was  not  more  proper  to  call  them  acts 
of  justification.  They  w^ere  such  partly  because  they  were  acts  of 
affiance  in  a  person  ;  partly  because  they,  the  sacraments  at  least, 
were,  as  he  believed,  not  merely  human  acts,  but  acts  on  the  part 
of  God,  recognising  and  adopting  those  who  would  receive  them. 
But  every  thing  in  the  new  endeavour  to  create  a  Protestant  system 
was  drawing  men  away  from  this  creed  and  these  sacraments. 
Systematic  articles  and  confessions  were  beginning  to  be  formed ; 
justification  was  again  taught  scholastically  as  one  of  a  set  of  dog- 
mas ;  the  very  meaning  of  it  was  escaping.  Now  Melancthon 
probably  was  scarcely  aware  of  this  danger,  for  he  was  an  Aristo- 
telian schoolman,  and  was  half  disposed  to  acquiesce  in  the  scho- 
lastic theories  which  Luther  abhorred.  But  his  dislike  of  separation 
led  him  to  the  same  result.  There  was  something  terrible  to  him 
in  the  thought  of  leaving  the  old  German  Church — the  Church  of 
his  fathers.  He  would  have  said,  "  We  have  made  our  protest 
against  the  abuses  of  Romanism ;  possibly  we  have  fulfilled  our 
work."  And  if  he  were  asked,  "But  what  then  becomes  of  the 
doctrine  of  justification  ?"  he  would  have  said,  "  Has  it  not  been  as- 
serted, in  a  sense,  in  the  Church  at  all  times  1  The  doctors  main- 
tain a  justification." 

For  a  moment  such  words  may  have  come  with  power  to  Lu- 
ther's mind  ;  whether  they  occurred  to  himself,  or  were  suggested 
by  his  friend,  they  will  have  derived  strength  from  some  Anabaptist 
atrocity,  or  some  Zuinglian  discourse  on  the  Eucharist.  But  an 
infamous  proceeding  of  the  Romish  court  will  just  then  have  come 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


107 


to  light,  or  a  decree  will  have  gone  forth  from  the  emperor  making 
reconciliation  impossible.  Then  such  thoughts  will  have  been  cast 
away  as  the  suggestions  of  a  fiend.  To  assert  justification,  not  a 
justification,  but  the  one  only  real  justification,  was  the  business  of 
his  life.  He  who  did  assert  this  could  have  no  peace  with  Rome  ; 
he  must  break  all  bonds  ;  the  name  of  Catholic  itself  must  be  cast 
away.  There  must  be  an  Evangelical  Church  ;  a  Church  witness- 
ing for  justification  by  faith,  though  all  Christendom  witnessed 
against  it ;  Germany  is  to  be  the  seat  of  such  a  Church.  But  it 
shall  not  be  built  upon  a  mere  notion.  The  Sacraments  shall  be 
the  great  constituents  of  it.  Baptism  shall  declare  to  its  members 
their  spiritual  citizenship.  They  shall  not  regard  the  Eucharist 
merely  as  a  feast,  at  which  they  are  to  express  their  own  faith  and 
love.  The  consecrated  elements  shall  not  be  spoken  of  as  if  they 
were  made  something  by  the  receiver ;  they  are  something  in  them- 
selves; they  are  consubstantiated  with  the  Divine  Presence.  This 
is  the  Lutheran  system,  and  of  this  the  Evangelical  Church  of 
Germany  professes  to  be  the  great  Conservatrix. 

II.  It  is  evident  from  these  remarks,  that  though  the  leading 
Protestant  doctrine  was  meant  to  be  embodied  in  Lutheranism,  we 
must  look  for  the  purely  Protestant  system  to  Calvinism.  It  is  not 
necessary  to  suppose  that  Calvin,  from  the  first  moment  that  he  began 
to  bear  witness  against  Romanism,  contemplated  a  separation  from 
the  old  Church.  Such  a  notion  would  be  contrary  to  all  that  we 
know  of  Ecclesiastical  History,  and  of  the  lives  of  those  who  acted 
in  it.  But  the  idea  of  an  Ecclesia,  consisting  of  individuals  taken 
out  of  the  world  by  divine  Election,  was  the  one  which  was  con- 
tinually present  to  his  mind,  and  which  gradually  subordinated 
every  other  to  itself.  As  all  the  appearances  and  conditions  of  the 
so-called  Church  outraged  in  Calvin's  apprehension  this  idea,  it 
must  embody  itself  somewhere  else.  No  self-willed  act  for  the 
construction  of  a  new  body  of  faithful  men  might  be  justifiable. 
But  the  circumstances  of  the  time  seemed  to  point  out  the  will  and 
purpose  of  God  ;  and  his  position  as  to  Geneva  enabled  him  to 
carry  out  that  purpose,  by  planting  the  seed  of  a  divine  society. 

'1  hat  this  society  should,  except  in  its  acknowledgment  of  a 
pope,  correspond  to  that  which  Calvin  did  not  deny  had  been  once 
established  by  God,  though  it  had  fallen  into  so  great  corruption, 


108 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


would  at  first  have  been  his  wish  ;  that  it  should  feel  itself  to  have 
some  links  of  connection  with  that  old  stock  might  be  well  on  some 
accounts,  though  on  others,  dangerous.  But  the  main  point  was, 
that  it  should  bear  witness  to  the  idea  of  a  distinct  election.  The 
question,  therefore,  practically  decided  itself.  The  Church  was  es- 
sentially a  collection  of  Individuals.  Now,  an  instinct  taught 
Calvin,  and  his  learning  helped  his  instinct — that  the  existence  of 
Episcopacy  involved  another  idea  than  this;  it  was  the  witness  of 
something  besides  mere  individual  association.  Episcopacy  there- 
fore was,  at  all  events  not  necessary  ;  might  it  not  be  on  the  whole 
rather  a  perplexing  and  unintelligible  institution  ? 

In  some  other  points  Calvin  could  use  language  not  very  differ- 
ent from  that  which  had  prevailed  among  the  Fathers,  and  in  the 
Catholic  Church.  He  attached  a  high  importance  to  Baptism,  and 
a  mysterious  worth  to  the  Eucharist.  Wherein  then  consisted  his 
difference  from  them,  and  even  from  Luther  ?  The  Fathers  actu- 
ally regarded  the  Incarnation — Luther  wished  to  regard  it — as  the 
foundation  of  the  Church  ;  Calvin  sought  for  this  foundation  in  in- 
dividual election.  In  this  difference  all  others  are  included.  This 
idea  of  election  involved  the  idea  of  a  particular  redemption  ;  the 
selection  of  particular  men  being  regarded  merely  in  the  light  of  a 
Divine  decree,  logically  implied  the  reprobation  of  the  rest.  Thus 
the  Calvinistic  system  is  formed — a  system  essentially  distinct  from 
the  Calvinistic  principle,  but  necessarily  involved  in  the  constitution 
of  the  Calvinian  Church.  To  Geneva,  as  the  nucleus  of  this  sys- 
tem, the  cradle  of  this  Church,  men  repaired  from  other  lands  for 
teaching  and  illumination.  Thence  came  John  Knox,  and  planted 
that  which  was  destined  to  be  the  most  vigorous  shoot  from  the 
Helvetian  stock.  Thence  came  Englishmen,  who  had  been  refu- 
gees during  the  Marian  persecution,  to  lay  the  foundation  of  our 
Puritanism,  and  of  the  different  nonconformist  sects  which  had  been 
derived  out  of  it.  Of  all  these  bodies,  however  much  they  may  dif- 
fer from  each  other,  the  Calvinistical  doctrine  is  the  animating 
principle  ;  when  that  is  forgotten,  or  adopted  into  any  other,  there 
ceases  to  be  any  meaning  in  their  existence. 

III.  Luther  and  Calvin  entertained  a  great  reverence  for  the 
old  Creeds  of  the  Church,  and  some  for  the  teaching  of  the  Fathers. 
Those  in  whom  reverence  for  the  Scripture  took  the  place  of 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


109 


every  other  feeling,  gradually  acquired  the  habit  of  disparaging 
both  :  but  this  was  not  their  main  or  distinguishing  characteristic. 
Looking  at  the  written  Word  of  God,  as  the  declaration  of  God's 
will,  and  as  his  great  gift  to  man,  they  became  impatient  of  the 
value  which  the  other  Reformers  attached  to  the  Sacraments,  es- 
pecially to  the  Eucharist.  Had  not  this  been  the  great  snare  of 
the  Romanists  1  had  not  the  belief  of  sacramental  grace  made  them 
substitute  something  else  for  the  great  facts  of  which  the  Bible  is 
the  Record  ?  It  was  well,  no  doubt,  as  it  was  commanded,  to  keep 
a  memorial  feast  in  remembrance  of  those  facts,  or  of  that  which 
is  the  most  transcendent  of  them.  This  was  to  be  the  sign  and 
bond  of  church  fellowship  in  all  ages  ;  but  the  notion  that  this 
memorial  feast  had  the  virtue  which  the  German,  and  even  the 
Genevan  doctor,  was  inclined  to  attribute  to  it,  opened  the  way  to 
all  superstition.  These  were  unquestionably  the  elements  of  a 
peculiar  system  ;  but  they  had  not  strength  to  be  the  groundwork 
of  a  society.  The  Zuinglians  succumbed  for  a  time  to  the  Calvin- 
ists ;  their  maxims  were  not  embodied  anywhere ;  but  on  that 
very  account  they  were  destined  to  exercise  a  more  powerful  influ- 
ence over  the  whole  Protestant  mass. 

Another  influence  of  the  same  kind  began  to  make  itself  mani- 
fest within  the  century  which  produced  the  Reformation  ;  of  the 
same  kind  in  more  senses  than  one,  though  apparently  most  unlike 
the  Zuinglian  influence,  inasmuch  as  that  seemed  to  contain  the 
very  essence  of  Protestantism,  and  this  to  be  in  direct  contradiction 
to  its  most  remarkable  peculiarity.  I  allude  to  the  doctrines  of 
Arminius  and  Grotius.  These  doctrines  looked  at  on  one  side  bore 
the  distinct  impress  of  the  Reformation.  They  were  set  up  in  op- 
position to  all  mystical  notions;  they  were  presented  as  the  plain, 
popular,  practical  view  of  men's  duties  and  responsibilities;  they 
were  deduced  from  texts  of  Scripture;  they  were  probably  felt  by 
their  principal  propagators  to  be  much  more  unlike  the  sacra- 
mental views  of  the  older  Church  than  the  Calvinistic  views  were. 
But  on  the  other  hand,  an  acknowledgment  of  the  absolute  will 
of  God  was  believed  to  be — as  we  have  seen  that  it  was — the  re- 
cognition upon  which,  not  one,  but  all  the  Protestant  doctrines 
were  grounded.  Because  Calvinism  had  put  forth  this  acknow- 
ledgment more  prominently  than  Lutheranism,  Calvinism  had  be- 


110 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


come  almost  identical  with  Protestantism ;  it  had  been  believed  to 
be  the  witness  against  the  self-willed  inventions  and  self-righteous 
doctrines  of  the  Romanists.  It  was  not  strange,  then,  that  the 
vehement  Protestants  in  England,  and  elsewhere,  should  identify 
Arminianism  with  Popery,  and  should  believe  that  the  same  deci- 
sive measures  were  necessary  for  extirpating  one  as  the  other. 
They  were  successful  in  preventing  Arminianism  from  establishing 
itself  into  a  rival  church  ;  they  were  quite  unsuccessful  in  prevent- 
ing it  from  leavening  the  minds  of  those  who  adopted  the  Genevan 
model,  and  subscribed  the  Genevan  confessions. 

IV.  Our  last  duty  in  this  section  would  be  to  consider  how  far 
any  of  these  systems  became  connected  with  the  government  of  the 
nations  in  which  they  established  themselves — or  whether  any  other 
has  arisen  to  assert  the  relation  between  Protestantism  and  national 
life.  But  the  last  of  those  questions  is  closely  connected  with  the 
history  of  the  English  Church ;  the  first  will  be  better  considered 
under  our  next  head. 


SECTION  IV. 

THE  PRACTICAL  WORKING  OF  THE  PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 

I.  The  character  of  Luther,  like  that  of  most  true  Teutons,  was 
compounded  of  hearty  joviality  and  deep  sadness.  It  has  often 
been  remarked  that  the  latter  element,  which  was  inseparable  from 
his  conflicts  and  his  vocation,  painfully  predominated  in  his  later 
years,  in  which  one  might  have  hoped  there  would  have  been  se- 
renity, if  not  sunshine.  Romanists,  and  many  who  are  not  Roman- 
ists, have  said,  that  but  one  inference  can  be  drawn  from  such  a 
fact;  he  felt  a  bitter  sense  of  disappointment  in  the  result  of  his 
labours  ;  if  pride  had  permitted  him,  he  would  have  confessed  that 
he  had  rashly  and  sinfully  entered  upon  them.  Such  observations 
are  very  plausible,  and  very  convincing  to  those  who  fancy  that  a 
man  commences  a  work,  like  that  to  which  Luther's  life  was  devot- 
ed, from  some  calculations  of  producing  an  effect  that  will  redound 
to  his  own  satisfaction,  or  profit,  or  honour,  or  even  to  the  advantage 
of  the  world.  He  cannot  be  governed  by  any  such  calculations  ; 
no  one  to  whom  mankind  really  owes  any  great  gratitude  was 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


Ill 


ever  governed  by  them.  A  mighty  Power  which  he  must  obey,  is 
urging  him  forward  ;  at  every  step  there  is  reluctance  ;  oftentimes 
he  says  to  himself,  "  I  will  speak  no  more  words  in  his  name  ;M  he 
is  ashamed  and  confounded  that  one  like  him  should  pull  down  and 
destroy  ;  but  the  fire  is  in  his  heart  and  it  must  come  forth  from  his 
heart,  whatever  it  consumes.  A  man  who  obeys  such  an  impulse 
will  have  much  sorrow  in  himself,  and  will  be  little  understood  by 
others.  All  he  can  say  in  his  own  defence  is,  "I  know  this  was  to 
be  done,  and  that  I  was  to  do  it."  Men  will  tell  him  that  a  knave 
might  use  the  same  language  ;  he  will  admit  it,  and  will  only  an- 
swer, "  Whether  I  be  a  knave  or  no,  I  do  not  stand  before  your  tri- 
bunal. My  judgment  is  with  the  Lord,  and  my  work  is  with  my 
God."  It  will  be  time  for  the  Romanists  to  say  that  Luther  did  not 
accomplish  any  thing  which  he  wished  to  accomplish,  or  which  his 
time  required,  when  they  are  able  to  explain  without  reference  to 
him  the  extraordinary  change  which  took  place  in  the  morality 
and  energy  of  their  own  hierarchy  in  the  generation  following.  It 
will  be  time  for  Protestants  to  sneer  at  Luther,  when  they  have 
fully  ascertained  that  every  step  out  of  the  errors  which  they  de- 
plore in  their  own  systems  will  not  be  made  most  effectually  when 
they  understand  the  spirit  in  which  he  acted,  and  enter  into  it ;  and 
whether  every  attempt  to  set  aside  the  principles  which  he  promul- 
gated will  not  establish  the  evils  of  those  systems,  and  strengthen 
them  by  the  addition  of  others  from  which  they  may  have  been 
separated. 

The  fact  however  must  not  be  concealed — Luther  did  feel  that 
Protestantism  in  every  form,  even  that  form  which  he  had  been  the 
means  of  establishing,  would  not  be  an  adequate  or  faithful  witness 
for  the  truth  which  he  had  existed  to  proclaim.  It  was  not  merely 
that  he  foresaw  a  loss  of  the  freshness  and  fervour  by  which  new 
converts  are  wont  to  be  distinguished  ;  he  felt — though  he  might 
not  be  able  to  find  a  reason  for  the  feeling  which  satisfied  him — 
that  there  was  something  in  the  idea  of  the  Evangelical  Church 
which  would  involve  the  necessity  of  great  practical  contradictions. 
Experience  has  justified  his  fears,  and,  faithfully  used,  may  perhaps 
assist  us  in  discovering  the  ground  of  them. 

As  soon  as  a  body  was  expressly  established  for  the  purpose  of 
asserting  the  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith,  the  confessions  and 


112  PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 

formularies  which  set  forth  that  doctrine  began  of  course  to  be  in 
the  highest  esteem.  They  were  the  casket  which  contained  the 
jewel,  and  the  jewel  could  not  be  preserved  without  the  casket.  It 
was  all  very  wrell  to  say,  The  Creed  contains  it ;  or,  as  Luther  would 
say,  He  that  can  declare,  I  believe  in  God  the  Father,  &c.  is  justi- 
fied— but  the  Romanists  acknowledge  the  Creed  too,  and  we  are 
to  defend  justification  against  the  Romanists.  It  was  still  more 
unsatisfactory  to  say,  The  Bible  contains  the  doctrine— the  Roman- 
ists acknowledge  the  Bible :  the  Bible,  interpreted  in  a  particular 
way,  or  not  interpreted  in  another  way,  might  seem  to  deny  it. 
Consequently,  a  certain  interpretation  of  the  Creed  and  of  the 
Bible  must  be  guarded  and  upheld  ;  these  formularies  have  been 
carefully  worded  to  include  that  interpretation,  and  to  exclude  every 
other  :  to  these  we  must  adhere. 

How  to  escape  from  an  argument  of  this  kind,  none  could  tell ; 
it  seemed  perfectly  conclusive.  Nevertheless,  in  a  very  little  time, 
some  men  arose  who  said  they  had  been  deceived.  You  tell  us 
justification  is  our  bond  of  union ;  but  it  is  not  so  ; — justification  is 
a  living  thing,  the  justification  of  which  Luther  speaks,  and  of 
which  St.  Paul  speaks,  means  the  deliverance  of  a  man's  conscience 
from  a  burden  and  a  bondage.  But  the  justification  of  which  you 
speak  means  a  notion  or  theory  about  something  which  you  call  by 
this  name;  which  theory  is  contained  in  a  certain  document  you 
call  a  confession. — This  will  not  do.  The  Evangelical  Church  is 
no  Church,  it  does  not  deserve  its  name,  if  it  do  not  consist  of  men 
who  are  really  justified.  Moreover  the  Bible,  which  is  a  real  book, 
and  speaks  of  the  real  justification,  must  be  the  book  of  the  Church, 
and  not  these  formularies — otherwise  Protestantism  is  not  Protest- 
antism. 

The  proclamation  went  forth ;  it  was  heard  and  felt  to  be  true ; 
the  living  preacher  was  followed,  the  dry  doctrinalist  deserted. 
But  what  is  the  living  preacher  to  do  with  those  who  follow  him  ? 
They  are  to  form  the  true  Church.  But  how  is  it  to  be  ascertained 
that  they  do  form  it  ?  We  must  see  that  they  really  feel  what 
they  profess,  that  they  experience  this  justification,  and  do  not 
merely  use  the  name.  Well  then,  there  must  be  another  set  of 
tests  introduced,  and  another  set  of  books  written  to  ascertain 
which  of  these  tests  are  sound,  which  fallacious. 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


113 


And  now  comes  another  reaction.  What !  it  is  said,  and  do 
you  call  this  Lutheranism  ?  Feelings,  experiences — Luther  ab- 
horred the  words.  All  Romanist  imposture  lurks  in  them.  Luther 
setup  his  doctrine  of  justification  as  a  witness  against  thern.  This 
proclamation  also  goes  forth.  It  is  seen  to  be  true  ;  men  hearken 
to  it ;  the  preachers  of  feeling  and  experiences  are  pronounced 
unsound.  Then  what  can  we  do  but  return  to  the  good  old  way. 
The  confessions  regain  their  esteem.  Believing  these  confessions 
must  mean  believing  justification  ;  there  is  no  help  for  it :  we  can- 
not come  at  any  other  rule.  The  records  of  this  series  of  reactions 
form  the  longest  and  most  important  chapter  in  the  history  of 
Lutheranism. 

But  there  is  also  another  chapter. 

The  ideas  of  Imputation,  Satisfaction,  Representation,  were,  I 
said,  expressed  to  Luther  in  living  acts  of  faith  and  devotion — in 
the  Psalms,  in  the  Creed,  and  Sacraments.  Apart  from  these,  he 
did  not  wish  to  contemplate  them,  though  he  might  be  compelled 
to  do  so  by  the  necessities  of  controversy.  But  it  was  the  business 
of  his  disciples  to  exhibit  all  these  ideas — being  inseparably  con- 
nected with  justification — in  very  precise  and  accurate  expressions. 
The  nature  and  mode  of  imputation  must  be  described  in  proposi- 
tions ;  it  must  be  made  clearly  and  definitely  intelligible  to  every 
one  how  the  divine  Justice  was  satisfied  ;  it  must  be  shown  what 
is  the  amount  and  measure  of  sacrifice  which  was  necessary  for  the 
deliverance  of  man  from  the  penalty  of  sin. 

If  these  statements  had  taken  the  purely  scholastic  form  which 
was  given  to  theological  propositions  before  the  Reformation — it 
would  have  been  seen  that  they  were  not,  at  all  events,  sufficient 
for  men's  wants ;  that  there  must  be  something  else,  since  the 
Gospel  was  meant  for  the  poor.  But  the  Reformation  had,  as  we 
have  seen,  a  peculiarly  popular  character.  Protestantism  addressed 
itself  to  common  men.  Even  the  books  that  were  written  for  the 
preachers  must  have  something  of  this  character,  as  they  were  to 
deliver  the  dogmas  which  they  learnt.  Hence  these  definitions 
and  propositions  became  strangely  mingled  with  popular  illustra- 
tions. The  language  of  the  schools  and  of  the  world  was  blended 
into  a  most  bewildering  mosaic.  Precedents  and  customs  from  the 
law-courts,  maxims  of  trade,  the  vulgarest  proverbs  of  worldly 

8 


114 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


men,  were  all  pressed  into  the  service  of  the  sanctuary,  and  used 
to  explain  and  defend  the  acts  of  Him  to  whose  righteous  judg- 
ment all  these  customs,  and  maxims,  and  proverbs  must  at  last  he 
brought.  And  because  in  the  dealings  of  men,  what  are  really 
deep  and  true  principles,  sometimes,  through  misunderstanding  or 
misapplication  to  purposes  for  which  they  were  not  intended,  come 
to  have  the  effect  of  fictions,  and  to  be  so  regarded,  and  as  fictions 
are  praised  and  accounted  clever  by  men  who  know  not  that  any 
utility  they  may  possess  is  derived  from  the  original  truth  that  is  in 
them ;  these  theologians  of  the  semi-scholastic,  semi-popular  class 
introduced  this  habit  of  thinking  into  their  own  study,  and  taught 
their  disciples  to  believe  it  nothing  horrible  that  fictions  should  be 
attributed  to  the  God  of  Truth. 

I  do  not  say  that  the  temper  I  have  described  was  more  char- 
acteristic of  the  Lutheran  or  Evangelical  Church,  than  of  the 
other  Protestants  ;  but  it  particularly  affected  the  class  of  doctrines 
which  that  Church  especially  undertook  to  defend,  and  the  opposi- 
tion to  it  was  perhaps  more  marked  in  that  than  elsewhere.  This 
opposition  arose  from  the  feeling  that  these  dogmatic  teachings 
had  nothing  to  do  with  practical  morality,  nay  affected  it  injuriously. 
The  Reformers  had  withstood  the  Popish  notion  that  family  duties, 
national  duties,  the  transactions  of  common  life,  were  less  holy 
than  the  services  of  the  cloister  ;  they  had  openly  or  implicitly 
discouraged  the  opinion  that  men  who  will  renounce  the  ordinary 
routine  of  social  life  may  hope  to  attain  a  peculiar  saintship.  Now 
their  language  was  turned  against  the  doctrines  which  they  had 
bequeathed.  Christianity,  it  was  said,  must  have  for  its  main 
object  the  inculcation  of  a  pure,  simple,  and  practical  scheme  of 
Ethics ;  it  could  not  be  intended  to  introduce  a  theory  more  diffi- 
cult or  embarrassing  than  that  of  any  Heathen  philosopher 
who  had  not  professed  to  provide  a  gospel  for  the  poor  and  igno- 
rant ;  least  of  all  could  it  be  meant  to  contain  notions  respecting 
the  ways,  designs,  and  character  of  God,  which  actually  contra- 
dicted all  the  notions  of  justice  and  benevolence,  which  we  recog- 
nise in  ordinary  life.  As  this  tone  of  thinking  diffused  itself  more 
and  more  widely,  a  set  of  maxims,  partly  appertaining  to  outward 
conduct,  partly  to  the  discipline  of  temper,  affections,  dispositions, 
gradually  shaped  themselves  out,  and  were  received  as  the  essential 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEM. 


115 


part  of  Christianity.  These  became  the  main  topics  in  the  discourse 
of  the  preacher ;  it  was  the  business  of  the  schoolman  to  show 
how  the  Bible  might  be  interpreted,  not  to  mean  more,  or  much 
more  (doctrines  being  freely  interpreted)  than  these  maxims.  Some 
could  satisfy  themselves  more  easily  than  others,  that  they  had 
succeeded  in  this  task.  Those  who  were  critically  honest,  felt  that 
there  were  great  difficulties — that  much  of  the  Bible  must  be  given 
up  in  order  that  the  notions  of  their  opponents  might  not  derive  a 
support  from  it.  The  precedent  had  been  given  by  Luther  himself ; 
it  was  possible  to  believe  that  the  carrying  out  of  that  precedent 
was  the  carrying  out  of  the  principle  of  the  Reformation.  Hence, 
the  commencement  of  that  form  of  Rationalism,  which  character- 
ized the  last  age. 

It  was  a  simple,  practical,  intelligible  system,  which  the  way- 
farer who  ran  might  read,  and  was  demanded  by  these  modern 
Protestants.  But  it  was  found  by  experiment  that  the  wayfarer 
who  ran  did  not  read  the  scheme  of  Christianity  which  was  thus 
presented  to  him.  The  poor  men  said  that  it  had  nothing  whatever 
to  do  with  them.  This  was  a  startling  practical  difficulty  which 
led  to  results  affecting  Protestantism  in  all  directions,  and  not 
merely  the  Lutheran  form  of  it.  But  what  I  wish  the  reader  to 
observe  here,  is,  how  little  the  body  which  took  justification  by 
faith  as  its  motto  and  principle,  has  been  able  in  any  stage  of  its 
history,  to  assert  that  doctrine ;  how  constantly  the  system,  whether 
interpreted  by  earnest  believers  or  stiff  dogmatists,  by  orthodox 
doctors  or  mere  moralists,  has  been  laboring  to  strangle  the  prin- 
ciple to  which  it  owes  its  existence. 

I  cannot  touch  at  present  upon  the  later  history  of  Lutheranism. 
It  belongs  to  the  records  of  a  great  struggle,  of  which  our  time 
has  witnessed  the  commencement  and  may  witness  the  completion, 
whether  the  doctrines  which  the  Remormers  proclaimed  are  to 
be  overcome  by  Romanism,  to  be  merged  in  Pantheism,  or  to  find 
for  themselves  some  surer  basis  than  either. 

II.  Some  of  my  remarks  upon  Luther  must  of  course  apply  to 
the  Calvinistic  bodies  ;  still  they  have  features  of  their  own,  which 
are  well  deserving  of  a  separate  consideration.  We  have  seen 
that  the  idea  of  an  Absolute  Will,  choosing  individual  men  out  of 
a  fallen  world,  is  not  merely  recognised  by  these  bodies  :  that  it 


116  PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 

is  actually  the  ground  of  their  existence.  What  strength  there  is 
in  that  belief,  what  deep  irresistible  truth  there  is  in  it,  has  been 
demonstrated  in  all  ages  of  the  world,  and  certainly  not  least  in 
the  history  of  Calvinism.  The  same  divine  might — I  dare  not 
call  it  by  any  other  name — which  was  permitted  to  go  forth  with 
the  Islamite  armies,  when  in  the  sight  of  Christians  who  had  lost 
the  faith  that  they  were  God's  chosen  and  appointed  servants,  and 
had  sunk  into  a  low  slavish  unbelief  of  a  spiritual  Presence  and  a 
spiritual  Kingdom,  they  proclaimed  that  God's  will  was  still  the 
supreme  law,  still  the  actuating  spring  of  all  human  energy — that 
same  might  was  given,  as  I  believe,  not  seldom,  to  the  Covenanters 
of  Scotland  and  the  Puritans  of  England,  when  they  dared  to  put 
their  trust  in  a  spiritual  arm,  and  to  mock  at  all  human  and  material 
weapons  which  set  themselves  in  opposition  to  it.  God  forbid  that 
we  should  lose  the  lesson  which  the  record  of  their  victories  con- 
tain, or  that  we  should  deny  that  they  were  victories  given  to  faith 
with  whatever  inconsistencies  that  faith  may  have  been  mingled. 

But  there  did  lie  in  the  heart  of  the  Mahometan  conquerors 
— mingled  with  the  very  truth  which  gave  them  all  their  power, 
and  to  their  understandings  inseparable  from  it — a  dark  and  des- 
perate fatalism,  which  was  to  prove  how  unlike  it  was  to  this  truth, 
by  the  difference  of  its  effects  ;  which  was  to  prove  that  the  system 
of  Mahomet — the  system  which  owed  its  life  to  this  principle — 
was  a  lie,  and  was  charged  with  a  curse,  not  a  blessing  to  mankind. 
The  history  of  the  Calvinistic  bodies  ought  to  show  whether  any 
similar  fatalism  be  hid  in  their  creed,  and  whether  they  owe  it 
rather  to  the  sound  portions  of  that  creed,  or  to  the  influence  of  a 
surrounding  atmosphere  which  they  did  not  create  and  would  have 
been  glad  to  exhaust,  that  they  have  escaped  from  the  same  gloom 
and  helplessness  which  has  succeeded  to  that  early  vigour  in  the 
soldiers  of  the  Crescent. 

I.  The  Calvinists  on  the  Continent,  since  their  first  establish- 
ment, have  exhibited  little  of  the  energy  which  I  have  attributed 
to  their  principle.  A  Dutchman  or  a  Genevan  might  ask  me  with 
a  sad  smile,  to  what  period  in  the  history  of  the  Reformed  Church 
I  could  point  as  affording  the  least  illustration  of  it.  But  the 
conflicts  at  the  Synod  of  Dort  soon  brought  to  light  the  denying 
side  of  the  doctrine,  and  gave  it  the  most  evident  predominance. 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


117 


The  Arminian  doctors  set  up.  or  seemed  to  set  up,  the  belief  of  a 
will  in  man  against  the  idea  of  Election.  The  Calvinists  be^an  to 
set  up  the  idea  of  the  Absoluteness  of  the  Divine  Will  against  the 
idea  of  a  will  in  man.  Dogmas  and  determinations  came  forth — 
perfectly  adequate  for  the  purpose  of  contradiction,  utterly  inade- 
quate for  the  purpose  of  assertion.  In  the  next  age  the  Calvinist 
found  that  he  had  got  the  notion  strongly  grafted  into  his  creed  and 
rooted  in  his  mind,  that  he  had  not  a  free  will ;  all  that  he  had 
lost  was  the  clear  conviction  that  there  was  a  Divine  will,  and 
that  he  had  any  connection  with  it. 

Then  began  some  of  the  same  reactions  as  in  the  Lutheran 
body  ;  men  feeling  that  they  wanted  more  than  logical  formulas 
about  Election;  declaring  that  the  sense  and  experience  of, a 
divine  election  was  the  condition  of  it ;  this  declaration  leading  to 
tests  for  ascertaining  who  possessed  that  condition  ;  such  tests 
again  denounced  as  setting  aside  the  very  idea  of  absolute  and 
unconditional  sovereignty. 

A  combination  of  the  spiritual  and  dogmatic  elements  is  found 
in  the  able  Dutch  and  German  Commentators,  who  arose  in  the 
early  part  of  the  last  century ;  but  they  resorted  to  that  same 
method  of  illustrating  the  scheme  of  God  by  human  precedents, 
which  I  have  already  noticed.  The  clear  acute  reasoning  temper, 
which  Calvinism  especially  fosters,  detected  the  inconsistencies  of 
it :  the  disciples  of  the  Swiss  Reformer  said  that  they  were  meant 
to  be  witnesses  for  simplicity ;  and  that  simplicity  in  forms  ought 
to  be  sustained  by  simplicity  of  doctrine  :  the  ethical  system 
became  universal,  and  Voltaire  wrote  to  tell  D'Alembert,  that 
there  were  few  preachers  in  Geneva  who  believed  a  word  of  the 
doctrine  which  Calvin  spent  his  life  in  propagating. 

2.  I  have  expressed,  in  as  strong  language  as  it  is  possible  to 
use,  my  belief  that  there  was  a  vital  and  powerful  element  in  the 
Scotch  Kirk  and  in  English  Puritanism,  which  came  out  in  the 
formation  of  the  one,  and  in  the  conflicts  of  the  other  with  our 
Royalty  and  Episcopacy.  I  am  not  anxious  to  qualify  the  asser- 
tion by  dwelling  on  all  the  cruelties  and  meannesses,  the  alternate 
cringing  to  the  state  and  insolent  domination  over  it,  which  marked 
the  history  of  Scotch  Presbyterianism  in  the  sixteenth  century,  or 
the  intolerance  and  persecution  which  characterized  the  English 


118 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


assertors  of  religious  freedom  in  the  seventeenth.  These  indications 
may  be  attributed  to  the  temper  of  the  age,  and  to  the  evil  lessons 
which  the  Calvinistical  bodies  learnt  from  our  Church.  It  is  more 
important  to  observe,  how  these  bodies  testified  for  the  principle 
which  called  them  into  existence  after  the  motives  to  violence  had 
disappeared.  The  difference  in  their  position  makes  the  experiment 
a  fair  one.  The  Scotch  Presbyterian  body  after  the  revolution 
was  raised  to  the  dignity  of  an  establishment ;  the  English  sects 
acquired  a  recognised  position  in  the  country,  but,  as  they  boast, 
were  not  hampered  by  any  state  alliance.  Moreover  the  English 
Calvinistical  sects  were  several  distinct  experiments,  as  to  the  mode 
of  expressing  the  principle  which  was  common  to  them  all.  To 
the  Presbyterians  it  seemed  that  there  was  one  general  scheme  or 
platform  of  polity  laid  down  in  Scripture  for  all  the  faithful ;  the 
Independent  asserted  the  right  of  each  distinct  congregation  to  be 
its  own  lawgiver  ;  the  Anabaptist  maintained  that  each  individual 
ought  to  be  conscious  of  his  own  adoption  into  God's  covenant, 
before  he  received  the  sign  of  it.  In  the  doctrine  of  this  last 
named  sect,  we  clearly  discern  the  idea  which  all  wTere  labouring 
to  embody.  Each  of  the  others  confessed  that  it  was  not  a  Church, 
but  the  shell  of  a  Church,  and  the  effort  to  become  one ;  the  Ana- 
baptists believed  that  if  they  had  not  actually  solved  the  problem 
how  to  make  the  piofessing  body  identical  with  the  elect  body, 
they  had  at  least  made  the  nearest  possible  approximation  to  a 
solution  of  it. 

In  the  period  which  followed  the  Revolution  we  have  the  most 
numerous  testimonies  from  their  own  authorities,  that  a  gradual  de- 
cay of  faith  and  doctrine  took  place  both  in  England  and  Scotland. 
In  the  latter  country  it  was  ascribed  by  all  the  older  Covenanters 
to  the  convention  with  the  government;  the  English  dissenters  can 
only  account  for  it  by  the  general  temper  of  the  times.  What  ren- 
ovating principle  there  was  in  either,  to  overcome  the  effects  of 
state  influence,  or  of  the  world's  infidelity,  does  not  appear ;  they 
both  alike  attribute  the  restoration  of  their  old  doctrine  and  of  some- 
thing like  their  former  zeal,  to  an  action  from  without,  to  an  action 
proceeding  from  a  corrupt  body,  against  which  they  were  each  pro- 
testing. The  preaching  of  Whitfield  in  Scotland,  of  Wesley  and 
Whitfield  in  England,  we  are  told  by  Presbyterians  and  dissenters, 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


119 


awakened  a  spirit  which  had  been  long  dormant  among  them.  But 
only  one  of  these  Oxford  divines  was  a  Calvinist,  and  his  preaching 
was  not  at  all  of  the  kind  which  w?as  likely  to  re-create  a  Calvin- 
istical  system.  The  quickening  influence,  however,  being  once  im- 
parted, these  bodies  began  to  require  a  doctrine.  Just  at  that  time 
an  American  divine  appeared,  who  united  remarkable  strength  of 
thought  to  an  earnest  spirit,  and  to  what  he  believed  was  a  profound 
veneration  for  the  name  and  creed  of  Calvin.  The  Edwards  ver- 
sion of  that  creed,  or  some  modification  of  it,  became  from  this  time 
forth  the  recognised  system  among  English  and  Scotch  Calvinists. 
Now  this  system,  just  so  far  as  it  received  its  complexion  from  the 
piety  of  its  author,  is  unquestionably  an  assertion  of  a  Divine  Will. 
The  strength  of  Edwards's  mind  seems  to  have  been  derived  from 
his  acknowledgment  of  a  distinct  Being,  dwelling  in  his  own  Abso- 
luteness and  Awfulness.  But  that  which  gives  his  system  the  logi- 
cal consistency  which  its  disciples  so  much  admire,  is  his  manner  of 
dispensing  with  a  Human  Will.  Man  is  a  piece  of  mere  mechan- 
ism, acted  upon  by  a  certain  set  of  motives ;  he  is  not  a  stone,  for  he 
has  certain  affections  and  sympathies,  which  are  susceptible  of  out- 
ward influences ;  but  the  notion  that  he  is  capable  of  being  deter- 
mined from  within  is  utterly  repudiated ;  the  very  object  of  the 
scheme  is  to  set  it  aside.  But  any  one  who  looks  at  the  nature  of 
that  power,  which  the  earlier  Calvinists  put  forth  in  action,  or  who 
even  attends  steadily  to  their  deeper  utterances,  must  perceive,  not 
merely  that  they  did  recognise  these  inward  determinations,  but 
that  the  belief  in  thum  was  the  life-giving  principle  of  their  minds. 
Whether  they  could  explain  the  connection  philosophically  or  not, 
the  idea  of  the  Divine  Will  was  inseparably  involved  with  the  ener- 
gy and  activity  of  their  own  human  will;  they  realized  the  one  in 
the  other.  This  logical  development  of  the  Calvinistical  idea  has 
therefore  the  strange  peculiarity,  that  it  stands  in  the  most  direct 
practical  contradiction  to  that  idea  as  it  existed  in  the  mind  of  Cal- 
vin himself,  and  of  all  who  sympathized  with  him.  I  say  practical 
— for  this  is  no  difference  about  words.  In  Scotland  especially,  the 
working  of  the  new  system  has  been  very  remarkable.  Find  any 
man  who  has  drunk  deeply  into  the  spirit  of  Knox  and  the  old 
Covenanters,  and  ask  him  what  manner  of  doctrine  he  hears  from 
the  Scotch  preachers  generally  (I  do  not  mean  of  the  Robertson 


120 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


school,  but  of  that  which  is  most  opposed  to  it) ;  whether  it  be  es- 
sentially the  same  with  that  which  he  supposes  was  delivered  two 
centuries  ago  ?  In  one  form  of  language  or  another  he  will  give  you 
to  understand  that  he  is  sensible  of  the  most  violent  contrast ;  that 
the  modern  Calvinism  is  a  compound,  to  which  if  John  Knox  has 
contributed  one  part,  Thomas  Hobbes  has  contributed  three.  The 
consequence  is,  that  a  young  man  going  from  the  house  of  his 
fathers  to  a  Scotch  university,  passes  by  the  most  natural  steps  pos- 
sible into  the  philosophical  system  with  which  the  religious  one 
has  been  leavened  :*  he  adopts  it  as  the  most  consistent  interpreta- 
tion of  the  phenomena  of  the  world ;  the  idea  of  any  thing  spiritual 
becomes  lost  in  his  mind.  Afterwards,  perhaps,  he  may  take  up 
some  one  of  those  philosophical  theories  by  which  his  countrymen 
have  endeavoured  to  modify  or  subvert  pure  Materialism  and  Utilita- 
rianism. But  he  takes  it  up  as  a  theory  merely ;  it  has  nothing  to 
do  with  his  life;  the  maxim  of  the  other  system  reigns  there,  only 
the  more  undisturbed,  because  it  presents  itself  less  formally  and  ob- 
trusively. Then  if  he  have  a  good  hardy  Scotch  understanding, 
which,  though  it  may  dally  with  abstractions,  has  great  sympathy 
writh  the  palpable  and  the  actual,  he  soon  becomes  weary  of  this 
child's  play,  and  goes  forth  into  the  world,  to  show,  by  his  success- 
ful management,  that  he  has  not  lost  that  sense  of  an  individual  im- 
portance and  position  which  characterized  his  forefathers,  though 
he  may  turn  it  to  a  different,  and  wThat  he  considers  a  much  more 
profitable,  account.  I  know  well  what  noble  minds  there  are  in 
Scotland,  in  whom  another  influence  from  that  which  I  have  describ- 
ed is  at  work,  and  who  think,  with  bitter  pain,  of  the  materialism 
which  has  crept  over  their  land.  But  these  have  no  dream  that  the 
old  faith  can  be  restored.  They  speak  with  great  reverence  of  the 
first  age  of  their  Kirk ;  they  denounce  Prelacy  and  the  English 

*  I  may  probably  be  encountered  by  the  observation,  that  Hobbes  is,  of  all  authors,  the 
least  likely  to  find  favour  with  a  young  Scotchman;  for  that  he  was  a  Dogmatist,  where- 
as Hume  the  proper  idol  of  Scotland  was  a  Skeptic.  The  criticism  I  believe  is  of  no 
great  value.  No  young  men  are  Skeptics  in  the  sense  in  which  Hume  was  a  Skeptic. 
Their  infidelity,  as  much  as  their  faith,  is  dogmatic.  If  they  worship  Hume,  they  wor- 
ship him,  because  they  imagine,  however  falsely,  that  he  arrived  at  certain  conclusions. 
They  suppose  him  to  have  believed  and  proved  that  the  world  is  under  the  dominion  of 
Necessity,  not  of  God— the  very  principle  of  Hobbes.  It  is  the  point  wherein  these 
writers  are  identical,  not  that  wherein  they  disagree,  which,  the  youthful  philosopher, 
escaping  from  a  Calvinistical  school,  takes  notice  of. 


4 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS.  l2l 

Church  with  vehemence  ;  they  dwell  with  affectionate  tenderness 
upon  the  patriarchal  life  and  discipline,  which  existed  in  the  rural 
districts  of  Scotland  (among  the  middle  classes)  but  a  short  time 
ago,  and  which  was  at  all  events  connected  with  Presbylerianism ; 
but  they  acknowledge  that  the  system  is  worn  out,  that  it  has  no 
longer  power  to  produce  energetic  action,  deep  thought,  or  a  sim- 
ple form  of  society ;  that  it  flourishes  only,  while  it  has  something 
to  fight  with  ;  that  the  symptoms  which  it  exhibits  in  its  decrepi- 
tude are  the  consequences  of  evils  and  weaknesses  which  were  con- 
cealed in  it,  when  it  was  in  its  best  estate — that  in  that  best  estate 
it  could  not  satisfy  the  wants  of  which  they  are  conscious.  What 
these  wants  are,  and  in  what  forms  they  have  expressed  themselves, 
are  questions  belonging  to  a  larger  subject,  upon  which  we  must 
presently  enter. 

The  present  political  crisis  in  the  Kirk  will  be  more  properly 
spoken  of,  when  we  touch  upon  its  connection  with  England.  The 
circumstances  of  the  Nonconformists  here  are  still  more  involved 
with  the  circumstances  of  our  own  Church ;  still,  it  is  almost  impos- 
sible to  notice  them  as  illustrations  of  the  history  of  Calvinism,  with- 
out looking  at  them  on  their  political  side.  As  theologians  they 
have  struck  out  no  path  for  themselves ;  what  philosophy  they  have 
is  derived  from  Scotland  or  America.  It  is  therefore  precisely  as 
bodies  possessing  a  certain  outward  organization,  that  they  suggest 
any  important  topic  for  reflection.  Of  this  fact,  they  are  themselves 
apparently  sensible ;  they  feel  more  and  more  that  they  exist  to 
oppose  and  destroy  certain  institutions,  which  they  find  established 
about  them.  If  wTe  look  at  the  sects  separately,  we  find  that  they 
are  confessedly  not  spiritual  bodies;  only  bodies  professing  to  in- 
clude within  them  a  certain  number  of  spiritual  individuals.  We 
find  new  congregations  arising  out  of  the  old,  protesting  that  these 
have  become  earthly  and  corrupt;  that  the  only  hope  of  a  pure 
Church  is  in  fresh  division  and  secession.  We  find  the  members  of 
the  old  societies  denouncing  these  endeavours  after  an  ideal  perfec- 
tion, and  maintaining  that  experience  has  always  confuted  them. 
We  find  accounts  given  by  their  own  members  of  proceedings  re- 
sorted to  in  the  election  and  deposition  of  ministers,  and  the  forma- 
tion of  congregations  which  are,  to  say  the  least,  what  men  com- 
monly call  secular. .  WTe  find  these  sects  engaged  in  angry  contro- 


122 


PROTESTANT  SYSTEMS. 


versies  with  each  other ;  the  Pasdobaptists  for  instance  vehemently 
denouncing  the  Anabaptists,  because  they  maintain  the  fearful  here- 
sy that  immersion  was  the  earliest  mode  of  initiation  into  the  Chris- 
tian Church.  We  find  the  leaders  of  these  bodies  complaining  of 
the  great  deadness  of  their  congregations,  and  endeavouring  to  pro- 
duce revivals  in  them,  by  methods  which  seem  to  us  of  the  most 
mechanical  and  material  character.  These  are  the  indications 
which  the  different  dissenting  bodies  present,  when  looked  at  sepa- 
rately or  in  their  relations  to  each  other.  It  is  wonderful  that  they 
should  wish  rather  to  fix  our  attention  on  the  great  united  force 
which  they  are  able  to  bring  into  play  at  public  meetings,  in  vestry 
rooms,  and  in  newspapers,  against  that  which  they  name  the  secu- 
lar anti-spiritual  Church  of  England  ?  Unquestionably,  if  she  be 
secular,  or  just  so  far  as  she  is  secular,  these  weapons  may  prevail 
against  her,  for  that  which  is  secular  may  be  destroyed  by  that 
which  is  secular:  if  she  be  spiritual,  they  will  be  as  powrerless 
against  her,  as  secular  armour  has  always  proved  against  a  spiritual 
principle,  whether  it  has  come  forth  in  Puritanism,  or  in  any  other 
shape.  But  this  is  not  the  question  now  before  us.  It  is,  whether 
the  evidence  furnished  by  the  Reformed  Church  on  the  Continent, 
the  Presbyterian  Kirk  in  Scotland,  and  the  English  Nonconformist 
sects,  tends  to  confirm  or  refute  the  notion  that  the  Calvinistical 
principle  is  a  sufficient  foundation  for  a  universal  Church,  and  the 
notion  that  that  principle  can  be  safely  preserved  in  a  Calvinistic 
system  ? 

III.  As  the  Zuinglian  doctrine  was  not  able  to  work  out  a  sys- 
tem or  church  for  itself,  and  as  I  have  already  noticed,  while  speak- 
ing of  the  Lutherans  and  Calvinists  on  the  Continent,  how  faith  in 
the  Bible,  which  wTas  the  strongest  element  in  that  doctrine,  fared 
under  the  protection  of  those  who  put  it  forward  as  their  exclusive 
profession,  I  may  here  close  my  remarks  upon  pure  Protestantism. 
Our  next  duty  is  to  trace  the  characteristics  of  that  system,  of  which 
Zuinglianism  has  often  been  called  the  parent,  and  in  w7hich,  as  wTe 
have  already  seen,  all  the  Protestant  systems  in  the  last  century 
showed  a  tendency  to  merge. 


CHAPTER  III. 

UNITARIANISM. 

Connection  of  [Tnitarianism,  with  pure  Protestantism,  with  Natural  Philosophy,  and 
with  the  System  of  Locke — Its  positive  side — Its  negative  side — Final  results. 

I  said  that  the  early  Quakers  acknowledged  many  of  the  doc- 
trines which  other  Christians  acknowledged,  but  that  the  sense  in 
which  they  received  them  was  determined  by  the  nature  of  those 
tenets  which  were  specifically  theirs.  It  would  be  incorrect  to 
apply  a  precisely  similar  observation  to  the  Reformers.  The  doc- 
trines which  were  not  characteristic  of  them,  but  which  were 
professed  by  their  Romanist  opponents,  and  under  certain  important 
modifications  by  the  Eastern  as  well  as  the  Western  Church — the 
doctrines  of  the  Trinity  and  Incarnation — stood  prominently  for- 
ward in  the  Protestant  confessions.  Luther  at  least  looked  upon 
them  as  the  primary  doctrines  of  Christianity,  and  upon  his  own 
great  principle  as  the  link  which  connected  them  with  the  distinct 
personality  of  each  man. 

But  what  was  not  true,  or  but  partially  true,  of  the  founders, 
was  emphatically  true  of  the  successors — whether  they  belonged 
to  the  spiritual  or  the  dogmatic  school.  The  former  uniformly 
spoke  of  Election,  Justification  by  faith,  the  authority  of  the  Writ- 
ten Word,  as  the  vital,  essential  truths  of  Christianity — those  which 
belonged  to  'personal  religion.  When  they  alluded  to  the  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity  it  was  in  some  such  language  as  this — Every  true 
Christian,  they  said,  must  needs  recognise  a  Creator,  a  Redeemer, 
and  a  Sanctifier.  These  offices  wTere  necessary  to  the  accomplish- 
ment of  his  salvation,  and  he  must  attribute  them  to  distinct  agents. 
Hence  the  necessity  of  admitting  this  principle.  But  the  thought 
would  present  itself:  "  these  offices  are  undoubtedly  distinct ;  but 
does  it  follow  necessarily  that  there  is  a  distinction  of  persons  ? 
May  not  that  notion  be  a  mere  effort  to  explain  a  diversity  of 
operations,  which  is  capable  of  being  accounted  for  upon  some  less 
difficult  hypothesis  Vs    The  suggestion  might  be  repelled  by  the 


124 


UNITARIANISM. 


humble  and  pious,  but  bolder  spirits  would  broach  it,  and  tha 
which  was  dreaded  by  the  fathers  as  a  temptation,  would  be  wel- 
comed by  the  sons  as  a  discovery. 

The  Dogmatic  school  used  a  different  language.  They  main- 
tained that  this  doctrine  was  taught  in  Scripture ;  it  formed  part 
of  the  confession,  and  was  just  as  necessary  as  any  other  part. 
But  here  another  kind  of  difficulty  presented  itself.  Were  the  texts 
alleged  in  behalf  of  a  doctrine  so  very  strange  and  incomprehen- 
sible, adequate  to  the  support  of  it  ?  Had  not  the  Romanists  done 
something  to  keep  alive  the  belief  of  it  by  their  traditions  ?  Was 
it  quite  consistent  with  Protestantism  to  own  such  help  ?  These 
questions  were  asked,  and  the  answers  to  them  from  the  doctors  of 
the  Evangelical  and  of  the  Reformed  Churches  became  daily  more 
faint  and  incoherent. 

I  have  shown  already  how  in  the  Calvinistical  bodies  from  the 
first,  and  in  the  Lutheran  so  far  as  they  caught  the  purely  Protest- 
ant complexion,  the  idea  of  the  Incarnation  was  deposed  from  the 
place  which  it  had  occupied  in  the  older  divinity  of  the  Church. 
The  state  and  constitution  of  humanity  was  determined  by  the  fall ; 
it  was  only  the  pure,  elect  body,  w7hich  had  concern  in  the  Redemp- 
tion ;  that  redemption  therefore  could  only  be  contemplated  as  a 
means  devised  by  God  for  delivering  a  certain  portion  of  his  crea- 
tures from  the  law  of  death,  to  which  the  race  was  subjected.  In 
endeavours  to  explain  the  mode  of  this  redemption,  and  to  justify 
the  limitation  of  it,  consisted  the  divinity  of  the  most  purely  Pro- 
testant wrriters,  and  for  this  end  they  resorted  to  those  arguments 
from  the  schools,  and  illustrations  from  the  market-place,  of  which 
I  spoke  in  the  last  chapter. 

Meantime  a  great  change  had  been  effected  in  men's  notions 
upon  several  subjects  not  obviously  theological.  The  experimental 
philosophy  in  physics  held  out  to  students  the  hope  of  attaining  an 
actual  knowledge  of  things,  by  delivering  them  from  the  impres- 
sions of  the  senses,  and  from  the  notions  which  the  understanding 
generalizes  out  of  those  impressions.  Already  this  philosophy  had 
borne  its  noblest  fruits,  and  the  Astronomer  had  asserted  a  principle 
as  true,  which  was  the  most  contradictory  to  sense  and  to  all  con- 
clusions from  sense. 

But  if  this  experimental  philosophy  wTere  the  great  means  of 


UNITARIAN  ISM. 


125 


leading  to  such  discoveries,  did  it  not  follow  that  Experience  was 
the  one  source  of  knowledge  ?  The  conviction  became  stronger 
and  stronger.  "  There  is  no  other,  there  can  be  no  other."  Then 
clever  men  began  to  explain  how  many  false  schemes  and  systems 
had  their  origin  in  the  notion  that  there  was  some  other  foundation 
of  knowledge  than  this,  and  each  fresh  exposure  drew  from  the 
enlightened  and  philosophical  world  a  fresh  peal  of  laughter  at 
the  absurdities  of  their  forefathers.  There  were  indeed  various 
thoughtful  men  in  different  parts  of  Europe  who  were  struck  with 
the  reflection,  that  the  new  doctrine,  which  seemed  to  have  grown 
up  side  by  side  with  the  great  experiments  in  natural  philosophy, 
had  led  to  exactly  the  opposite  result.  Physical  science  had  ad- 
vanced, or  rather  had  been  found  to  be  possible,  just  so  far  as  it 
had  set  itself  free  from  sensible  impressions,  and  the  notions  de- 
duced out  of  them.  Moral  science  was  advancing,  it  was  believed, 
to  its  perfection,  by  acknowledging  these  impressions  and  notions 
as  the  only  standard  of  truth.  But  such  suggestions  were  little 
heeded  at  the  time.  It  became  the  first  tenet  of  philosophical 
orthodoxy,  which  it  was  most  dangerous  to  dispute,  that  sensible 
experience  is  the  foundation  of  all  belief  and  of  all  knowledge. 

The  rise  of  this  philosophical  theory  is  historically  connected 
with  that  of  a  great  political  theory,  wThich  was  also  to  displace 
all  that  had  gone  before  it.  In  order,  it  was  said,  to  make  men 
tremble  at  certain  doctrines  or  notions  wThich  contradicted  their 
experience,  it  was  necessary  to  make  them  tremble  also  at  the 
authority  by  which  these  notions  and  doctrines  were  communicated. 
A  mystery  was  supposed  to  attach  to  the  origin  of  society  as  well 
as  to  the  origin  of  knowledge.  The  one  opinion  was  as  fallacious 
as  the  other.  As  knowledge  comes  in  the  simplest  and  most 
obvious  way  through  eyes  and  ears,  so  society  grew  up  in  the 
simplest  way  by  compacts  and  conventions.  Experience  was  the 
root  of  both.  Men  either  felt  the  miseries  of  fighting,  or  dreamed 
of  the  blessings  of  government ;  they  waived  their  privilege  of 
being  independent  units,  and  either  yielded  themselves  passively 
to  one  who  was  stronger  than  they,  or  else  entered  into  stipula- 
tions with  him  to  rule  them  till  they  should  find  his  rule  burden- 
some. 

All  these  points  must  be  taken  into  consideration,  if  we  would 


126  UNITARIAN1SM. 

understand  the  temper  of  the  last  age  and  the  nature  of  the  scheme 
which  obtained  so  much  secret  or  acknowledged  prevalency  in  it. 
To  suppose  that  there  is  nothing  positive  in  Unitarianism,  that  it 
derives  all  the  popularity  it  has  ever  enjoyed  from  its  denials,  is  a 
plausible  but  a  serious  mistake.  It  has  been  embraced  by  a  num- 
ber of  earnest  minds,  which  never  could  have  had  any  sympathy 
with  a  system  merely  because  it  rejected  what  other  men  believed. 
I  do  not  say  that  they  may  not  have  felt  a  certain  delight  in 
that  peculiarity  of  their  doctrine  ;  that  the  thought  of  being  differ- 
ent from  the  vulgar  mass  may  not  have  been  flattering  to  them,  as 
it  is  to  the  evil  nature  of  all  men  ;  and  that  the  positive  and  nega- 
tive elements  of  their  minds  being  confounded  by  their  opponents, 
may  not  at  last  have  become  hopelessly  confounded  by  themselves. 
But  I  do  maintain,  that  something  deeper  and  more  solid  lay  be- 
neath their  not-belief ;  that  it  is  very  important  to  know  what  that 
was,  not  only  for  their  sakes  but  for  our  own ;  not  only  because 
the  only  way  of  extricating  any  man  from  a  falsehood  is  to  do 
justice  to  his  truth  ;  but  because  by  this  course  the  history  of  the 
Church  and  the  plans  of  God,  so  far  as  we  may  be  allowed  to 
examine  into  them,  become  far  more  intelligible. 

I.  From  the  dogmatic  tendencies  which  distinguished  one  class 
of  Protestant  theologians,  and  from  the  disposition  to  exalt  and  all 
but  deify  the  modes  and  experiences  of  their  own  minds  which 
belonged  to  another,  the  natural  philosopher  wras  equally  free. 
But  if  he  were  a  simple,  humble  man,  if  he  had  been  trained  in  his 
youth  to  the  habit  of  worship,  if  he  had  been  taught  to  connect 
deep  and  holy  thoughts  with  the  idea  of  God's  presence,  his  voca- 
tion would  certainly  not  diminish  his  awe  and  reverence.  It  would 
call  such  feelings  forth ;  nay,  he  might  easily  believe  that  they 
were  first  given  to  him  when  the  marvellous  distinctions  and  in- 
woven harmonies  of  creation  revealed  themselves  to  him.  At  all 
events  he  was  in  a  new  world,  a  freer  world — it  would  seem  a 
more  real  world — than  that  of  experiences  and  notions  ;  one  which 
bore  a  more  immediate  and  naked  witness  of  a  Divine  Being.  It 
was  only  afterwards  that  this  witness  came  forth  in  the  guise  of 
arguments  and  demonstrations  (the  mind  of  a  scientific  man  natur- 
ally enough  endeavouring  to  clothe  all  thoughts  in  the  forms  to 
which  it  was  habituated,  and  recognising  this  idea  of  a  God  as  one 


UNITARIANISM. 


127 


of  those  certainties  to  which  such  forms  would.be  applicable); 
but  the  heart  and  conscience  had  spoken  first ;  the  testimony  had 
been  received  already  there  where  it  was  needed,  before  the  slow 
machinery  of  proofs  was  constructed  to  justify  the  assumption,  and 
the  spirit  had  bowed  and  worshipped  writh  a  mixed  fear  and  joy  at 
hearing  in  the  world  without  the  echoes  of  a  nearer  and  a  deeper 
voice. 

Thus  nature  spoke  to  one  brought  up  in  a  Christian  atmosphere, 
as  it  was  not  impossible  to  suppose  it  might  have  spoken  to  some 
wondering  sage  of  Greece  or  India.  It  seemed  to  bring  the  news 
of  a  simpler,  earlier,  more  universal  faith,  which  must  belong  to 
all,  and  which  all  might  receive.  Other  testimonies  might  be  add- 
ed to  this,  to  confirm  it,  or  to  restore  it;  but  no  true  testimony  could 
set  it  aside  or  contradict  it.  And,  therefore,  were  our  Scriptures  to 
be  prized  to  the  utter  rejection  of  all  Shasters  containing  the  my- 
thologies of  the  old  or  new  world.  The  first  evidently  were  affirm 
ing  and  re-establishing  this  primary  testimony ;  the  others  were 
outraging  it.  The  belief  of  a  being  not  manifested  in  outward 
forms,  but  manifested  in  his  works  ;  not  divided  according  to  the 
diversity  of  his  operations,  but  one,  was  the  belief  which  lay  at  the 
root  of  all  their  teaching.  And  since  the  universality  of  Christian- 
ity had  superseded  the  narrowness  of  Judaism,  it  was  evident  that 
this  belief  must  be  asserted  with  only  greater  clearness.  It  would  be 
strange  if  the  universal  religion  were  more  wrapped  up  in  particular 
notions  and  opinions,  were  less  expansive,  than  the  ancient,  which 
did,  however,  testify  most  strongly  against  idolatry,  as  a  limitation 
of  the  Divine  Presence  and  a  division  of  his  essence;  strange  if  the 
more  perfect  religion  were  to  throw  us  back  upon  the  very  notions 
from  which  the  imperfect  had  succeeded  in  emancipating  all  who 
faithfully  received  it.  By  such  feelings  and  arguments  did  the  idea 
of  the  unity  of  God  gradually  raise  itself  up  in  the  last  age  against 
the  faith  which  had  been  recognised  in  Christendom  for  seventeen 
centuries.  Where  lay  the  force  of  these  feelings  and  arguments? 
Surely  in  the  strong  inward  conviction  which  they  expressed,  that 
the  unity  of  God  is  a  deep,  primary  truth,  which  no  words  can  ex- 
plain away,  no  experiences  of  ten  thousand  minds  make  unreal,  no 
dogmas  of  ten  thousand  generations  turn  into  a  nullity;  that  it  has 
stood  its  ground  and  asserted  itself  in  defiance  of  all  such  words, 


128 


TTNITARIANISM. 


experiences,  dogmas;  that  every  thing  which  is  true  in  the  teaching 
which  men  have  received,  has  tended  to  bring  it  into  clearer  mani- 
festation. With  this  conviction  was  associated  another,  less  clear- 
ly brought  out,  but  the  stronger  perhaps  for  being  latent,  that  this 
idea  of  the  unity  of  God  must  in  some  way  or  other  be  the  ground 
of  all  unity  among  men;  that  if  there  be  a  universal  religion,  this 
idea  must  be  at  the  root  of  it.  With  such  convictions  let  no  man 
dare  to  trifle ;  rather  let  him  labour  by  all  means  to  draw  them  forth 
into  great  strength  and  clearness,  bringing  so  far  as  he  can  all  his- 
tory, and  the  history  of  Unitarianism  in  the  last  century  most  espe- 
cially, to  illustrate  them.  _ 

2.  A  natural  philosopher,  trained  to  pious  and  reverent  feelings, 
free  from  petty  vanity,  and  keeping  himself  aloof  from  vulgar  ex- 
citements, is  more  likely  than  most  men  to  have  a  calm  and  cheer- 
ful temperament.  His  mind  is  not  turned  in  upon  itself;  the  evil 
which  is  there  is  not  constantly  reminding  him  of  its  presence;  his 
circumstances  do  not  oblige  him  to  contemplate  the  sins  of  the 
world ;  he  is  habitually  occupied  with  objects  which  are  serene  and 
unchangeable.  To  such  a  man,  the  lessons  which  he  has  received 
in  his  childhood  respecting  a  Being  of  perfect  love  and  purity,  will 
recur  with  particular  delight;  every  new  fact  in  nature  will  bring 
them  home  to  him  ;  the  whole  face  of  nature  will  seem  to  be  beaming 
with  them.  But  then  the  thought  will  occur  to  him  of  other  les- 
sons received  in  his  childhood,  which  seemed  to  contradict  these ; 
lessons  respecting  justice,  and  vengeance,  and  schemes  for  remov- 
ing or  propitiating  wrath.  Of  a  being  possessing  such  attributes, 
and  needing  to  be  approached  in  such  a  manner,  nature  says  no- 
thing. There  may  be  tempests  and  volcanoes,  but  all  her  opera- 
tions, so  far  as  we  are  able  to  penetrate  them,  are  subject  to  fixed, 
unchangeable  laws ;  these  will  at  last  be  found  to  obey  a  law  too, 
and  He  to  whom  we  refer  all  creation  and  all  laws,  must  needs  have 
a  mind  perfectly  at  one  writh  itself,  subject  to  no  vicissitudes,  the 
same  yesterday,  and  to-day,  and  for  ever.  Here  again,  see  how 
the  pure,  original  testimony  to  God's  universal  love  has  been  dark- 
ened by  human  conceits  and  systems.  But  that  testimony  is  reas- 
serted in  our  Bible,  distinguished  by  this  characteristic  as  much  as 
by  its  assertion  of  the  divine  unity,  from  all  pretended  revelations. 
The  heathens  are  denounced  in  the  Old  Testament  for  setting  it 


UNITARIAN  ISM. 


129 


aside  by  their  cruel  inventions ;  Jesus  Christ,  by  his  words  and  acts, 
condemned  the  Jews  because  they  were  not  honouring  God  as  the 
God  of  mercy  and  love ;  his  dispensation  is  one  from  which  every 
other  idea  is  banished ;  the  beloved  disciple  affirms  in  words  that 
God  is  love ;  all  sacrifices  and  institutions  interfering  with  that  no- 
tion are  expressly  abolished.  Such  were  the  feelings  and  argu- 
ments by  which  thousands  in  the  18th  century,  either  openly  or 
secretly,  were  led  to  believe,  that  the  idea  of  Atonement,  which 
had  been  assumed  for  seventeen  centuries  to  be  the  radical  idea  of 
Christianity,  was  a  wretched  and  inconsistent  graft  upon  it  from 
some  other  stock.  Where  lay  the  strength  of  them  ?  In  the  con- 
viction, it  seems  to  me,  that  the  idea  of  the  love  of  God  is  an  abso- 
lute primary  idea  which  cannot  be  reduced  under  any  other  ;  which 
cannot  be  explained  away  by  any  other ;  which  no  records,  expe- 
riences, dogmas,  if  they  have  lasted  for  a  thousand  generations,  can 
weaken  or  contradict ;  which  must  be  the  foundation  of  all  thought, 
all  theology,  all  human  life.  With  such  a  conviction  I  believe  it  is 
as  dangerous  to  trifle,  as  with  that  respecting  the  divine  unity. 

3.  I  have  spoken  of  the  natural  philosopher  as  withdrawn  from 
the  observation  of  the  evils  in  the  world  around  him,  and  to  a  great 
extent  of  his  own,  and  as  disposed,  by  his  circumstances,  to  a  benig- 
nant view  of  things.  How  pleasant  to  such  a  man  when  he  came 
from  his  closet  and  his  problems,  with  a  mind  in  a  measure  fixed  and 
abstracted  but  not  unharmonized,  to  look  round  upon  his  children, 
and  to  recollect  what  he  had  been  told  in  his  nursery,  that  He  who 
created  the  sun  and  moon  was  their  father.  How  pleasant  when 
he  had  time  to  think  of  all  the  generations  which  had  looked  upon 
the  light  of  this  sun  and  moon,  to  believe  the  same  of  them.  But 
what  jarring  thoughts  derived  from  the  same  nursery  would  intrude 
themselves !  All  these  children  of  men,  all  these  generations,  have 
undergone  a  fall  \  they  are  the  subjects  of  a  curse  !  Of  only  a  few, 
how  few,  if  the  calculations  of  different  divines  are  to  be  admitted, 
is  it  possible  to  think, "  these  are  God's  children;"  all  the  rset  we 
can  only  speak  of  as  doomed,  and  not  it  would  seem  by  their  own 
sin  but  by  an  inevitable  necessity.  Surely  this  too  must  be  one  of 
the  wretched  interpolations  into  the  old  and  simple  faith.  Nature 
teaches  no  such  lesson.  The  same  sunshine  and  rain  for  all ;  the 
whole  universe  claimed  for  its  Creator.    And  the  Bible  does  mean 

9 


130 


% 

UNITARIANISM. 


this,  must  mean  it,  whatever  divines  may  assert  to  the  contrary. 
In  some  way  or  other  it  does  reconcile  the  existence  of  man  with 
its  witness  of  God's  love;  in  this  way  it  cannot.  By  such  feelings 
and  arguments  was  the  doctrine  of  a  Fall — admitted  for  seventeen 
centuries  by  all  Christendom,  recognised  as  the  central  doctrine  of 
Christian  divinity  by  the  Protestant  sects — driven  out  of  the  hearts 
of  thousands  in  the  eighteenth  century. 

Against  these  convictions,  the  orthodox  of  the  day,  especially 
those  of  the  Calvinistical  school,  opposed  many  plausible  argu- 
ments. A  belief  in  the  unity  of  God,  they  said,  was  no  doubt  in 
some  way  compatible  with  a  belief  in  the  Trinity,  but  we  were  not 
to  trouble  ourselves  with  efforts  at  a  reconciliation.  The  subject 
was  mysterious,  profoundly  mysterious ;  how  could  we  hope  for 
light  upon  it  when  there  were  so  many  subjects  connected  with  our 
common  life,  of  which  we  knew  next  to  nothing  ?  The  Bible  re- 
quired this  belief ;  numerous  texts  might  be  adduced  which  could 
be  explained  upon  no  other  hypothesis ;  abandon  it,  and  you  must 
abandon  much  more,  even  many  of  those  truths  which  it  had  been 
the  peculiar  glory  of  Protestantism  to  assert. 

The  principles  respecting  the  character  of  the  Divine  Being,  were 
disposed  of  in  a  similar  manner,  only  with  more  of  logical  and  me- 
taphysical subtlety.  It  was  questioned  whether  we  are  bound  to 
consider  the  names  given  to  the  attributes  of  one  wholly  divine  and 
incomprehensible,  as  having  the  same  signification  with  those  names 
when  they  describe  qualities  in  us;  it  was  said  that  we  must  depend 
wholly  on  revelation  for  our  knowledge  of  God,  and  that  if  certain 
acts  and  feelings  were  ascribed  to  Him  by  the  Bible,  we  must  sim- 
ply acknowledge  them,  and  wait  for  the  explanation  of  them  in  a 
future  state;  it  was  maintained,  that  the  attribute  of  justice  was  as 
essential  to  the  perfection  of  God  as  that  of  mercy. 

To  the  notions  respecting  the  fall,  various  answers  were  given. 
First,  the  universality  of  human  depravity  was  said  to  be  asserted  in 
many  passages  of  Scripture  ;  secondly,  it  was  attested  by  experi- 
ence; thirdly,  it  was  incompatible  with  the  acknowledgment  of  a 
natural  conscience  in  man ;  fourthly,  it  was  the  consequence  of  a 
wilful  act  on  the  part  of  the  first  man ;  and  fifthly,  the  visitation 
of  the  consequences  of  that  act  on  his  posterity  might  be  defended 
by  many  human  analogies. 


UNITARIAN1SM. 


131 


These  arguments  were  produced  in  various  forms,  and  with  va- 
rious degrees  of  ability  ;  but  there  were  two  barriers  against  them 
which  they  were  quite  powerless  to  break  down.  The  first  was  that 
strong  feeling  1  have  spoken  of  already,  that  these  principles  con- 
concerning  God  and  man  are  great  uliimate  principles,  which  can- 
not be  denied  without  denying  every  thing  that  is  true  and  solid, 
and  which  must  receive  the  most  distinct  and  solemn  acknowledg- 
ment, unless  we  would  have  all  the  rest  of  our  belief  confused  and 
false.  To  raise  any  specific  argument,  any  set  of  texts,  against 
them  was  propter  vitam  vivendi  perdere  cansas — to  set  aside  by 
reasoning  the  first  witness  of  reason  ;  by  passages  from  the  Bible, 
that  which  was  its  end  and  substance.  This  was  the  irresistible 
protection  of  the  Unitarian  system  in  the  minds  of  earnest  men  who 
had  embraced  it.  There  was  another  equally  secure  defence  to 
persons  of  the  most  opposite  character.  It  consisted  in  the  doc- 
trine which  Locke  had  proclaimed — not  in  a  full,  clear,  steady  con- 
templation of  that  doctrine,  and  all  its  results,  for  then  Hume's 
conclusion  stared  them  in  the  face,  then  it  was  felt  "  There  is  no 
warrant  for  acknowledging  any  being,  eternal,  immaculate,  invisible ; 
for  of  no  such  being  do  the  senses,  or  experience  arising  from  the 
senses,  furnish  an  indication" — but  in  a  loose,  popular  impression 
about  the  doctrine — a  general  feeling  spread  through  society,  that 
experience  was  in  general  the  only  root  of  knowledge,  that  you 
were  not  to  believe  much  which  you  could  not  establish  by  its 
evidence.  This  philosophy,  which  was  commonly  recognised  by 
those  who  assailed  Unitarianism,  as  well  as  by  those  who  defended 
it,  gave  to  the  arguments  of  the  former  the  strangest  appearance  of 
inconsistency.  They  were  simply  affirming  something  to  be  re- 
vealed or  made  known  to  man,  which  according  to  his  nature  or 
constitution,  as  they  understood  it,  could  not  be  revealed  to  him.  He 
was  to  learn  and  receive  something  which  he  could  not  learn  and 
receive;  a  condition  the  Unitarians  rightly  said  which  even  Papists 
had  not  exacted ;  for  in  the  days  when  Popery  had  made  its  great 
demands  on  men's  faith  this  doctrine  of  experience  was  not  under- 
stood. And  this  demand,  they  went  on  to  say,  you  urge  upon  us 
at  a  time  when  the  very  idea  of  a  body  which  can  make  it  has  been 
scattered  to  the  winds.  A  Catholic  Church,  if  there  could  be  such 
a  thing,  a  body  having  divine  and  mysterious  endowments,  might 


132 


UNITARIANISM. 


with  some  consistency  claim  an  assent  to  a  mysterious  dogma.  But 
your  confession  of  Augsburg  has  dispersed  that  dream.  You  have 
constituted  societies  which  you  may  call  churches,  or  what  you 
will,  but  which  do  not  and  cannot  pretend  that  they  have  any  au- 
thority over  the  world.  They  may  lay  down  what  canons  or  max- 
ims they  please  for  their  individual  members  ;  they  have  the  same 
right  of  private  legislation — of  making  rules  for  their  own  govern- 
ment, be  they  ever  so  absurd,  which  every  other  corporation  pos- 
sesses. But  the  only  warrant  for  impossing  an  inexplicable  creed 
upon  mankind  is  gone.  Each  portion  of  mankind  has  its  own  ha- 
bits, maxims,  opinions ;  each  man  his  own  particular  judgments, 
which  he  has  a  right  to  exercise  and  defend  against  the  world ; 
there  are  a  few  common  principles,  admitted  alike  by  saint,  by 
savage,  and  by  sage,  but  these  so  far  from  being  identical  with 
those  incomprehensible  doctrines,  are  the  very  reverse  of  them. 

Never  surely  were  more  plausible  opinions  promulgated  in 
the  world  than  these ;  never  any  which  seemed  to  carry  with  them 
a  more  natural  and  less  painful  demonstration.  To  divines,  they 
seemed  a  deliverance  from  the  strangest  intellectual  confusions ;  to 
easy  and  comfortable  men,  the  removal  of  an  inexplicable  burden 
from  their  consciences ;  to  those  who  desired  to  be  philosophical, 
the  satisfaction  of  their  longing ;  to  those  who  disliked  extremes, 
a  convenient  refuge  from  the  difficulties  of  belief,  and  the  dreariness 
of  infidelity.  But  the  more  such  persons  crowded  into  the  ranks  of 
Unitarianism — (not  in  general  by  an  open  renunciation  of  their  for- 
mer creeds,  but  by  habitually  and  practically  confessing  a  disbelief  in 
them) — the  more  were  those  who  had  adopted  it  on  the  other  more 
positive  grounds,  startled  and  confounded. — With  deep  awe  they 
had  acknowledged  the  Unity  of  God,  as  the  unfathomable  founda- 
tion of  thought,  and  faith,  and  being.  Now  they  heard  that  unity 
asserted,  not  as  mysterious  and  unfathomable,  but  as  the  escape 
from  mystery.  It  was  a  purely  material  notion ;  all  the  arguments 
in  its  favour  were  deduced  from  the  impossibility  and  contradiction, 
which  a  Trinity  presents,  when  it  is  contemplated  materially.  But 
where,  they  asked  themselves,  is  unity  in  matter  ?  Is  not  matter 
infinitely  divisible  ?  Can  this  be  the  way  of  escaping  from  con- 
tradictions ?  Can  this  be  the  way  to  be  rational  ?  Throwing 
aside  every  thing  but  materialism — dismissing  every  thought  that 


UNITARIANISM. 


133 


lies  beyond  it — we  are  then  called  upon  to  recognise  an  idea,  of 
which  matter  affords  no  realization — scarcely  the  indication  !  Such 
thoughts  brooded  in  their  minds,  and  led  them  by  very  slow  pro- 
cesses, and  through  bitter  conflicts  to  the  conviction ;  "  if  the  Unity 
of  God  is  to  be  asserted  it  must  be  asserted  on  quite  different  grounds 
from  those  which  the  so-called  Unitarians  have  chosen,  and  the 
true  assertion  of  it  may  possibly  be  contained  in  those  creeds  which 
we  have  rejected." 

On  the  popular  supporters  of  Unitarianism  such  arguments 
made  no  impression.  They  probably  received  them  with  indigna- 
tion. What  !  they  would  have  said,  Do  you  suppose  we  meant  a 
metaphysical  unity  ?  we  meant  to  escape  from  all  subtleties — the 
Bible  is  written  for  simple  people.  I  have  hinted  already,  that  this 
language  was  unfortunate;  they  appealed  unto  Cesar  —  unto 
Cesar  they  must  go.  They  wished  to  be  tried  by  simple  people ; 
it  remained  to  be  seen  whether  there  was  that  in  their  scheme,  to 
which  the  hearts  of  simple  people  responded.  But,  before  that 
experiment  was  made,  the  more  thoughtful  disciples  of  Unitarianism 
began  to  be  struck  with  another  strange  contradiction  between  the 
principles  on  which  it  rested,  and  the  system  in  which  they  are  em- 
bodied. The  Unitarians  were  the  great  assertors  of  the  absolute 
unqualified  love  of  God,  in  opposition  to  all  mythologies  and  theo- 
logies which  had  preceded.  And  Unitarianism  was  the  first  of  all 
theologies  or  mythologies,  which  denied  that  the  Almightly  had,  in 
his  own  person,  by  some  act  of  condescension  and  sacrifice,  inter- 
fered to  redress  the  evils  and  miseries  of  his  creatures !  Every 
pagan  religion  had  acknowledged  the  need  of  an  incarnation  ;  the 
modern  Jew  and  Mahometan,  nominally  rejecting  it,  is  yet  continu- 
ally dreaming  of  it  and  testifying  of  its  necessity — it  was  reserved 
for  this  religion,  to  make  it  the  greatest  evidence  and  proof  of  love 
in  a  Divine  Being,  that  He  merely  pardons  those  who  have  filled 
the  world  with  misery ;  that  He  has  never  shared  in  it ;  never 
wrestled  with  it ;  never  devised  any  means,  save  that  of  sending  a 
wise  teacher,  for  delivering  mankind  out  of  it. 

Again ;  to  a  man  who  really  cherished  with  earnest  affection 
the  thought,  "God  is  a  universal  Father,  his  creatures  cannot  be 
merely  the  subjects  of  a  curse,"  what  a  strange  reflection  it  must 
have  been — "  And  yet  according  to  those  doctrines  which  I  hold — 


134 


UNITAR I ANISM. 


he  is  not,  and  cannot  be  a  Father.  The  word  means  nothing.  It 
is  a  lazy  inappropriate  synonym  of  MaJcer,  for  it  is  the  very  glory 
of  my  creed  to  do  that  which  no  other  has  done ;  first  to  deny  that 
there  is  any  human  bond  between  men  and  God  ;  secondly,  to  deny 
that  they  have  in  themselves  any  capacity,  different  from  that  which 
an  animal  has,  of  receiving  impulses  from  God." 

Once  more ; — to  purify  men  of  their  false  notions  of  morality,  to 
establish  religion  on  the  basis  of  morality,  and  to  reveal  the  exist- 
ence of  another  world  than  the  present,  were,  according  to  Unita- 
rianism,  the  objects  of  Christ's  appearance  in  the  world,  and  the 
objects  which  the  reformers  of  his  doctrine  were  to  keep  steadily 
in  sight.  For  this  end  they  were  to  desire  the  removal  of  all  sys- 
tems and  institutions  which  had  kept  alive  a  false  faith  and  a 
distorted  notion  of  the  character  of  God.  "  But  who,"  the  disap- 
pointed disciple  of  this  school  inquired,  "  who  are  the  great  helpers 
in  this  work  of  reformation  ? — who  show  most  longing,  that  it 
should  be  accomplished  ?  Are  they  men  of  deep  thought  and  high 
devotion,  who  have  been  poring  in  sadness  over  the  condition  of 
society — in  solitary  chambers  crying  out,  Usque  quo,  Dornine  ?  Are 
they  even  poor  men,  not  aiming  at  some  high  standard,  but  feeling 
the  burden  and  oppression  of  the  universe,  and  believing  that  God 
could  not  have  meant  so  many  of  his  creatures  to  live  and  die,  with- 
out comfort  or  hope  ? — or  are  they  not  rather  men,  who  for  the 
most  part  have  preserved  a  quite  decent  level  tone  of  mind  and 
character ;  who  belong  to  the  easy,  respectable,  prosperous  classes, 
and  who  are  actually  impatient  of  any  thing  which  disturbs  them 
with  the  recollection  of  an  elevated  supersensual  morality,  or  of  a 
society  based  upon  self-sacrifice  ?" 

Alas !  he  will  have  said — and  is  it  for  this  only  that  I  have 
parted  with  all  the  dreams  of  my  childhood  ?  I  thought  in  my  in- 
fancy that  a  kingdom  of  righteousness,  peace,  joy,  had  been  set  up 
in  the  world,  and  that  I  was  to  wait  and  hope,  till  that  kingdom 
should  rule  over  all.  It  has  been  the  glorious  discovery  of  my  man- 
hood, that  there  is  no  such  kingdom  here — nothing  but  a  wvrld,  in 
which  men  are  to  observe  certain  rules  of  behaviour  towards  each 
other,  to  restrain  themselves  within  certain  rules  of  prudence  for 
their  own  sakes,  and  to  cheer  themselves  with  the  prospect  of  a 
future  world — unknown  and  undefined — wherein  they  shall  be  re- 


UNITARIANISM. 


135 


warded  if  they  have  not  transgressed  social  decorums,  and  be  for- 
given if  they  have. 

Such  a  picture  of  the  tendencies  and  ultimate  results  of  the 
system,  must  often  have  presented  itself  to  those  who  had  embraced 
it  with  affection,  as  a  deliverance  from  the  dryness  and  narrowness 
of  Calvinism,  and  as  a  witness  for  the  unity  and  love  of  God.  But 
these  thoughts  would  only  have  stirred  powerfully  in  a  few  minds 
if  a  series  of  strange  movements  had  not  taken  place  in  European 
society,  some  of  which  must  have  seemed  most  promising  to 
Unitarians,  but  which  really  destroyed  the  whole  credit  of  their 
system — depriving  it  of  the  patronage  of  nobles  and  prelates,  and 
supplying  it  with  no  substitute  in  the  sympathies  either  of  the 
thoughtful  or  of  the  poor. 


I 


CHAPTER  IV. 

ON  THE  TENDENCY  OF  THE  RELIGIOUS,  PHILOSOPHICAL,  AND  POLITICAL 
MOVEMENTS  WHICH  HAVE  TAKEN  PLACE  IN  PROTESTANT  BODIES,  SINCE 
THE  MIDDLE  OF  THE  LAST  CENTURY. 


SECTION  L 
RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 

Methodism — Religious  Societies — Search  for  a  Theology. 

The  history  of  [Methodism,  in  one  of  its  aspects,  belongs  to  the 
history  of  the  English  Church,  and  does  not  therefore  form  a  part 
of  the  subject  I  am  now  considering.  But  any  considerate  reader 
will  admit,  that  as  France  has  been  the  centre  of  the  political,  and 
Germany  of  the  philosophical  movements  of  the  last  hundred 
years,  so  England  has  been  the  centre  of  all  religious  movements 
which  have  occurred  within  the  same  period.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  maintain  that  the  first  impulse  to  them  was  given  in  England ; 
Wesley  may  have  derived  much  of  his  teaching  frem  Zinzendorf, 
and  the  different  efforts  made  by  him  and  by  others  to  awaken  a  more 
earnest  religious  feeling,  may  take  chronological  precedence  of 
those  which  our  countrymen  witnessed ;  still  the  form  which  they 
assumed  here  was  so  much  more  determinate,  their  influence  so 
much  more  extensive,  that  if  we  wish  to  investigate  their  character 
generally,  we  shall  find  that  our  own  soil  is  the  proper  place  for 
the  experiment. 

It  is  often  said,  that  the  Methodist  movement  had  for  its  object 
and  its  effect  the  revival  of  the  great  principles  of  the  Reformation. 
There  is  a  sense  in  which  this  remark  is  unquestionably  true ;  but 
if  that  sense  be  not  carefully  noticed  and  defined,  we  may,  I  think, 
fall  into  great  mistakes.  The  Unitarianism,  which  formed  so 
large  an  element  in  the  religious  sentiments  of  the  eighteenth 
century  was,  as  we  have  seen,  essentially  impersonal.    It  was  soj 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


137 


even  in  its  best  form — for  those  who  felt  most  deeply  and  earn- 
estly the  necessity  that  great  and  wide  principles  should  be  assert- 
ed respecting  the  unity  and  character  of  God,  found  no  way  of 
connecting  these  principles  with  the  individual  conscience.  It  came 
out  in  direct  opposition  to  Calvinism  — as  an  escape  from  it,  and 
yet  as  what  seemed  a  consistent  deduction  from  some  of  its  max- 
ims ;  and  the  more  it  advanced  towards  a  mere  system  of  denials, 
the  more  it  was  proclaimed  as  a  deliverance  from  the  narrowness 
of  this  theology.  Above  all,  Calvinism  had  maintained,  that  a  set 
of  individual  believers  constituted  the  Church,  and  were  to  bear 
witness  against  the  world ;  the  Unitarians  affirmed  that  no  war- 
rant existed  for  any  such  protest ;  that  an  enlightened  age  or  world 
was  far  in  advance  of  those  who  pretended  to  be  in  separation 
from  it ;  that  the  great  object  which  such  an  enlightened  world 
should  propose  to  itself,  was  the  extinction  of  the  idea  of  an  Ec- 
clesia,  in  whatever  shape  that  idea  might  present  itself. 

It  was  inevitable  that,  in  any  strong  revival  of  religious  feel- 
ing, these  notions  should  be  first  attacked  ;  in  other  words,  that 
the  personal  interest  of  men  in  religion,  and  the  distinction  of 
those  wTho  felt  and  acknowledged  that  interest  from  those  who 
were  indifferent  to  it,  should  be  asserted.  Such  convictions  are 
characteristic  of  any  strong  awakening  in  men's  consciences ;  they 
may  be  said  to  be  the  awakening.  But  then  the  vague  phrase — 
personal  interest  in  religion — cannot  long  be  adequate  to  describe 
the  feelings  of  men  who  have  begun  to  use  in  it  a  real  sense. 
One  who  knows  that  he  is  a  person  requires  a  personal  object — 
an  abstraction  cannot  satisfy  him.  The  doctrine  therefore  that  a 
man  is  justified  by  faith,  and  lives  by  faith  in  Christ,  became  a 
principal  element  in  the  Methodist,  as  it  had  been  in  the  early 
Lutheran  teaching ;  the  doctrine  that  individual  believers  consti- 
tute a  peculiar  Ecclesia  grew  out  of  that ;  and  the  Bible  began 
again  to  be  put  forth  as  the  poor  man's  book,  which  he  could  re- 
ceive in  its  simplicity,  though  the  learned  sought  to  explain  it  away. 

But  it  is  remarkable,  that  the  most  decided  proclamation  of 
these  Protestant  dogmas  grew  not  out  of  Methodism  itself,  but  out 
of  a  reaction  in  the  minds  of  those  who  had  been  brought,  more 
or  less  directly,  under  its  influence.  The  history  of  the  very  violent 
conflicts  of  the  Calvinists  under  Toplady  and  Sir  Richard  Hill 


138 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


against  Wesley  and  Fletcher,  is  abundant  evidence  of  this  fact.  It 
is  true  that  the  most  powerful  of  the  Methodist  preachers,  Whit- 
field, joined  the  opponents  of  his  master  and  early  coadjutor ;  but 
it  is  highly  probable  that  he  was  led  to  this  step  by  observing 
how  much  his  own  preaching  had  tended  to  stir  up  affections  and 
feelings  in  men's  minds  rather  than  to  give  them  a  firm  resting- 
place — and  that  he  sought  in  the  Calvinistical  doctrines  for  a  bal- 
ance and  a  counteraction  to  this  danger :  at  all  events  it  is  quite 
certain  that  though  a  far  greater  influence  was  attributed  to  him 
in  his  lifetime  than  to  Wesley,  he  left  a  comparatively  insignifi- 
cant body  ol  disciples.  It  must  then,  I  conceive,  be  admitted,  that 
the  revival  of  these  Protestant  doctrines,  though  it  might  be  an  in- 
separable accident,  was  not  the  essential  distinction  of  Methodism. 
There  was  something  in  it  different  from  the  feelings  which  worked 
in  the  mintls  of  the  Reformers — nay  opposite  to  them,  though  not 
therefore  incompatible  with  them. 

I  think  every  one  must  admit  that  Luther  and  Calvin  directed 
men  very  much  more  to  the  invisible  object  which  men  are  to 
contemplate,  or  to  the  original  source  of  their  faith  in  the  Will  of 
God  ;  and  the  Methodists  very  much  more  to  the  operations  of  a 
Divine  Spirit  upon  their  own  minds.  This  distinction  is  so  ob- 
vious, and  was  so  clearly  brought  out  in  the  controversies  to 
which  I  have  alluded,  by  persons  who  acknowledged,  that  they 
had  once  adopted  the  Methodist  peculiarity  themselves,  and  who 
showed  clearly  that  they  could  not  divest  themselves  of  it 
even  while  they  laboured  diligently  to  speak  another  language, 
that  it  needs  not  to  be  established  by  proofs,  though  it  ought 
to  be  very  carefully  noticed.  The  denial  that  it  was  possible  for 
men  to  be  the  subjects  of  a  spiritual  influence,  was  the  great  char- 
acteristic of  Unitarianism,  and  of  the  age  which  was  imbued  with 
it;  the  assertion  of  the  reality  of  such  an  influence,  and  of  its  con- 
tinual manifestation,  was  the  distinguishing  property  of  the  teach- 
ing which  disturbed  and  partially  subverted  the  liberal  system. 

But  there  were  other  peculiarities  connected  with  this.  Method- 
ism was  not,  like  Quakerism,  the  proclamation  of  a  law  in  each 
man's  own  mind,  or  of  a  power  working  there.  It  was  expressly 
addressed  to  large  masses  of  men;  the  power  was  believed  to  de- 
scend upon  them,  especially  when  they  wTere  met  together ;  and 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


139 


though  every  individual  was,  in  an  important  sense,  said  to  be 
taken  apart  and  brought  into  debate  with  his  own  conscience,  it 
was  not  denied  that  the  feeling  of  a  united  influence  had  a  great 
tendency  to  increase  the  consciousness  of  it  in  each  one.  All  that 
was  most  fanatical  in  the  Methodists  was  undoubtedly  connected 
with  this  belief,  and  it  gave  the  most  plausible,  often  the  most  just 
ground,  for  the  assertion,  that  the  effects  said  to  be  produced  by 
their  preaching  might  be  traced  wholly  to  contagion  and  sympa- 
thy, and  would  disappear  when  the  moving  cause  had  ceased. 
Still  we  do  not  get  to  the  meaning  of  a  fact,  merely  by  using  the 
words  "  contagion  and  sympathy"  to  describe  it ;  fanaticism  and 
even  consciously  dishonest  quackery  cannot  produce  any  results 
unless  they  have  some  true  principle  to  work  with,  and  it  seems 
as  if  the  principle  involved  in  Methodism  might  be  one  which  has 
often  been  dawning  upon  us  in  our  previous  inquiries,  though  we 
have  never  yet  found  any  satisfactory  development  of  it.  We  have 
often  been  obliged  to  ask  ourselves,  whether  these  distinct  individ- 
ual acts,  on  which  Protestantism  dwells  so  exclusively,  may  not, 
must  not,  depend  at  last  upon  some  relation  in  which  men  stand  to 
their  fellows;  whether  we  can  take  our  start  from  individuals, 
and  form  a  society  out  of  them ;  whether  the  existence  of  society 
be  not  implied  in  their  existence ;  and  whether,  consequently,  if 
each  man  have  a  spiritual  existence,  and  be  subjected  to  a  spiritual 
government,  there  must  not  be  somewhere  a  spiritual  body,  of 
which  he  should  account  himself  a  member?  The  facts  of 
Methodism  may  offer  but  few  helps  for  solving  this  problem,  but 
assuredly  they  force  it  upon  our  attention,  and  make  it  more 
abundantly  necessary  that  we  should  seek  the  solution  of  it  some- 
where. 

There  are  other  points  of  great  importance  and  interest  closely 
connected  with  the  two  to  which  I  have  adverted.  This  proclama- 
tion of  a  spiritual  power  went  forth  from  men  who  had  been  brought 
up  in  a  university  which  had  the  reputation  of  preserving  more  of 
the  old  Catholic  temper  than  could  be  found  elsewhere,  and  whose 
very  nickname  indicated  that  they  had  been  more  scrupulous  and 
regular  than  the  majority  in  their  devotion  to  forms  and  ordin- 
ances. Those  who  are  acquainted  only  with  the  practices  which 
the  Wesleys  afterwards  tolerated,  and  which  their  followers  regard 


140 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


as  characteristic  of  their  system,  would  not  easily  believe  how 
much  importance  they  attached  in  the  outset  of  their  career  to  the 
episcopal  ordination  of  ministers.  Nevertheless  a  certain  impa- 
tience of  order — nay,  a  conviction  that  it  ought  to  be  broken 
through — might  be  discovered  in  them  from  the  first.  It  seemed 
to  them  that  there  was  an  immense  body  of  human  souls,  which 
had  no  national  position,  and  of  which  the  nation  took  no  account. 
The  upper  classes  in  England  cared  not  much  for  religious  minis- 
trations, but  they  might  have  them  if  they  would ;  the  middle 
class,  if  they  were  not  particularly  well  affected  to  the  National 
Church,  had  provided  for  themselves  in  different  organized  and 
tolerated  sects ;  but  the  class  below  them,  the  mob,  the  canaille, 
as  they  were  then  named  by  their  despisers,  the  masses,  as  they 
are  now  called  by  their  flatterers,  were  as  little  regarded  by  the 
churchman  who  inherited  the  family  living,  as  by  the  dissenting 
minister  who  received  his  appointment  from  the  tradesman  of  the 
market  town.  To  these,  therefore,  the  Methodists,  like  the  friars 
of  old,  addressed  themselves;  in  them  they,  like  those  friars, 
awakened  thoughts  and  hopes  to  which  their  educated  country- 
men had  appeared  for  a  long  time  to  be  strangers ;  in  providing 
for  their  wants,  like  the  friars,  they  invaded  the  privileges  of  the 
parochial  (both  alike  would  have  called  them  the  secular)  clergy. 
I  know  not  in  what  way  Bishop  Lavington  maintained  the  position 
that  the  enthusiasm  of  the  Methodists  and  of  the  Papists  had  many 
points  in  common ;  but  no  one  who  considers  these  facts,  or  a 
hundred  others  connected  with  the  peculiar  superstitions  to  which 
they  respectively  gave  currency,  will  doubt  that  he  may  have 
found  very  plausible  arguments  in  favour  of  his  opinion.  At  all 
events,  it  must,  I  think,  be  admitted,  that  Methodism  had  some  im- 
portant peculiarities  which  it  did  not  derive  from  Protestantism,  and 
with  which  apure  exclusive  Protestantis  m  can  scarcely  coexist. 

2.  The  practical  belief  of  a  spiritual  operation  upon  the  minds 
and  hearts  of  men,  may  be  said  to  constitute  Methodism  so  far  as 
it  is  a  creed.  But  as  soon  as  the  creed  had  obtained  prevalency,  a 
system  developed  itself,  which,  as  Mr.  Southey  has  remarked,  is  a 
more  complete  specimen  of  organization  than  any  which  has  been 
produced  in  Europe  since  the  days  of  Loyola.  The  more  this  or- 
ganization is  examined,  the  less  it  seems  to  have  to  do  with  any 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


141 


spiritual  principle;  the  more  evidently  it  proves  itself  to  be  an  in- 
vention of  human  policy.  This  assertion  will  scarcely  be  denied 
by  Wesley ans  themselves;  though  they  are  stronger  than  most  in 
asserting  the  principle  of  a  divine  inspiration  in  individuals,  they 
have  pretended  less  than  almost  any  that  their  scheme  had  a  divine 
origin ;  they  attribute  it  with  scarcely  any  hesitation  to  the  wisdom 
and  sagacity  of  their  founder  and  of  his  successors.  In  one  respect 
only  is  there  a  resemblance  between  the  system  and  that  which  call- 
ed it  into  existence;  the  spiritual  feelings  of  the  Wesleyans  led 
them  to  overlook  national  distinctions ;  the  system  of  the  Methodists 
is  essentially  extra-national.  It  is  the  effort  to  establish  a  power- 
ful government  in  the  heart  of  a  nation,  which  at  no  point  shall  im- 
pinge upon,  or  come  into  contact  with  the  government  of  the  nation. 
It  differs  from  the  systems  of  the  older  dissenting  sects  in  this  im- 
portant point ;  the  limits  of  each  of  them  are  defined  by  the  profes- 
sion of  some  peculiar  tenet  in  which  they  differ  from  the  others,  and 
from  the  rest  of  Christendom ;  that  of  the  Wesleyans,  professing  no 
tenet  which  is  not  recognised  or  tolerated  by  the  National  Church, 
simply  exists  to  assert  their  own  independence  of  it,  and  the  im- 
portance of  such  an  organization  as  theirs  for  the  conversion  of 
mankind. 

In  this  respect  Wesleyanism  is  an  indication  and  specimen  of 
the  religious  tendencies  which  prevail  in  this  age  very  far  beyond 
the  immediate  circle  of  its  influence.  The  religious  feeling  of  the 
last  century  has  given  birth  to  religious  societies,  between  which 
and  their  parent  one  finds  it  difficult,  for  some  time,  to  discover  a 
feature  of  resemblance.  The  first  tended  to  draw  men  into  them- 
selves ;  the  last  throw  them  altogether  out  of  themselves.  The  first 
was  grounded  upon  the  acknowledgment  of  a  directly  spiritual  influ- 
ence, as  the  only  source  of  any  moral  change  in  the  condition  of 
individuals  or  of  the  world ;  the  latter  are  constructed  upon  the 
most  earthly  principles,  and  seem  to  attribute  all  power  to  them. 
Accordingly  the  contrast  has  been  felt,  as  well  by  the  good  men 
who  took  part  in  the  movements  of  the  last  age  and  have  survived 
them,  as  by  the  younger  men  who  have  grown  up  under  their 
teaching.  The  first  confess,  with  something  of  timidity,  as  if  they 
were  afraid  of  appearing  to  disparage  the  fruits  of  a  tree  which  they 
believe  to  have  been  planted  by  a  divine  hand,  that  the  restless 


142  RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 

turmoil  and  bustle  of  a  modern  religious  life  is  not  what  they  or 
their  fellow-labourers  would  have  wished  to  produce ;  the  latter  in 
more  open,  sometimes  in  more  angry  language,  complain,  that  under 
spiritual  words  and  pretexts  there  has  grown  up  amongst  us  a  great 
machinery — complicated,  noisy,  but  inefficient  to  produce  any  great 
results;  acknowledging  no  law  in  its  workings, save  certain  vulgar 
maxims,  which  are  applicable  only  to  trade,  if  even  trade  itself  do 
not  demand  principles  of  a  simpler  and  nobler  kind.  Nevertheless 
we  find  the  very  persons  who  make  these  complaints  confessing 
that  they  know  not  how  to  dispense  with  this  machinery,  for  that 
there  must  be  some  method  of  combined  voluntary  action,  grounded 
not  upon  our  relations  to  each  other  as  members  of  a  state,  but 
upon  some  higher  and  more  universal  relation.  Here  again  then 
we  are  struck  with  indications  of  a  Catholic  feeling  arising  out  of 
the  very  heart  of  Protestanism. 

3.  The  religious  feelings  of  our  age,  in  both  the  forms  which 
they  have  taken,  seem  almost  incompatible  with  the  existence  of  a 
positive  theology.  Men  studied  the  movements  and  operations  of 
their  own  minds  till  these  and  their  endless  vicissitudes  acquired  such 
an  absorbing  interest,  that  the  idea  of  the  absolute  and  the  perma- 
nent was  almost  lost.  They  fled  from  these  inward  contemplations 
to  occupy  themselves  with  an  external  mechanism,  which  they  be- 
lieved was  meant  to  promote  the  glory  of  God ;  how  difficult  not 
to  believe  that  any  meditation  upon  his  being  and  nature  was  an 
idle  occupation  for  schoolmen !  how  difficult  not  to  feel  an  entire 
alienation  of  mind  from  such  studies !  Therefore  it  has  come  to 
pass  that  the  main  part  of  what  is  called  theology  in  Great  Britain 
of  late  years  has  been  an  attempt  to  systematize  individual  experi- 
ences, or  else  to  discover  some  general  theory  about  the  condition 
and  prospects  of  the  world  at  large.  Still  the  craving  in  men's 
hearts  after  something  deeper  and  larger  than  this  can  never  be  ex- 
tinct ;  the  literature  of  past  times,  which  bears  witness  that  men  have 
ventured  into  a  more  awful  sanctuary,  was  not  wholly  closed  ;  and 
by  degrees,  either  weariness  of  merely  experimental  divinity  and 
mere  views  about  the  world,  or  a  conviction  that  they  cannot  sub- 
sist alone,  has  led  to  the  inquiry,  whether  that  which  was  once 
called  Theology  be  a  reality  or  only  a  dream  ? 

In  Germany,  where  outward  religious  excitements  are  so  few, 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS.  143 

where  students  are  students  in  the  strictest  sense,  and  where  habits 
of  meditation  are  assiduously  cultivated,  those  who  had  felt  the 
evangelical  influence,  and  had  been  delivered  by  it  from  the  mate- 
rialism of  the  last  age,  soon  perceived  that,  unless  this  influence 
led  to  a  search  for  theological  principles,  it  would  melt  away,  or 
only  produce  a  succession  of  fever-paroxysms.    They  therefore  ap- 
plied themselves  earnestly  to  consider  how  the  religious  feelings, 
without  being  lost  or  weakened,  could  be  turned  in  this  direction. 
They  had  seen  the  mischiefs  which  the  dry  dogmatism  of  the  Lu- 
theran and  Calvinistical  bodies  had  produced ;  they  had  seen  that 
the  spirit  of  man,  whenever  it  was  strongly  stirred,  became  im- 
patient oithis  dogmatism,  and  sought  to  escape  from  it  by  making 
spiritual  motives  and  consciousnesses  all  in  all.    Did  not  these  ob- 
servations prove  that  the  affections — the  seat  of  these  conscious- 
nesses— are  the  proper  and  appointed  organs  of  religious  belief? 
And  may  it  not  be,  that  all  religion — so  far  as  it  acts  from  without 
— is  simply  an  orderly  cultivation  of  these  affections  ;  educing  them, 
and  enabling  them  to  perceive  those  objects  and  that  character 
which  must  correspond  to  their  wants,  and  which  are  fitted  to  give 
them  a  living  and  permanent  form  ?    Every  one  must  perceive  how 
much  there  was  in  the  circumstances  of  the  age  to  suggest  the 
thought,  that  this  is  the  all  comprehending,  all  satisfying  idea  of 
Christianity.    It  was  in  fact  the  scientific  methodism  of  the  Evan- 
gelical feelings  and  tendencies,  which  at  once  vindicated  them  from 
the  charge  of  being  incoherent  and  fanatical,  and  promised  them  an 
escape  from  the  peril  of  becoming  so.    It  seemed  to  justify  much 
in  the  Scriptures  which  philosophical  men  in  the  last  age  had  given 
up  as  untenable,  and  at  the  same  time  to  make  the  abandonment  of 
much  which  religious  men  had  thought  indispensable,  no  longer 
unsafe.      It  was  no  strange  contradiction  upon  this  hypothesis 
to  believe,  that  the  all-perfect  Being  should  manifest  himself  to  men 
in  one  of  their  own  nature;  that  was  evidently  the  form  in  which 
alone  He  could  present  himself  as  an  object  to  their  affections,  and 
in  which  the  affections  witnessed  that  they  needed  He  should  pre- 
sent himself.    Symbols  which  brought  this  image  more  near  to 
men's  hearts  and  symphathies,  carried  in  them  an  evidence  of  their 
truth  which  no  abuse  of  them  could  set  aside,  and  they  preserve  us 
from  the  tendency  to  mere  intellectual  dogmatism.    On  the  other 


144 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


hand,  the  history  of  the  way  in  which  the  divine  manifestation  took 
place  might,  perhaps,  be  open  to  criticism.  Criticism  could  do  no 
harm  by  dealing  severely  with  the  shell  of  it ;  for  the  kernel  within 
was  something  which  the  affections  could  not  afford  to  part  with, 
and  would  defend,  in  defiance  of  all  efforts  to  rob  them  of  it.  The 
criticism  of  the  last  age,  because  this  principle  was  not  admitted, 
was  generally  false.  Much  had  been  thrown  away  as  superfluous 
which  the  affections  felt  to  be  necessary;  many  things  perhaps 
suffered  to  remain  against  which  they  protested.  For  it  will  be 
found,  say  these  teachers,  that  they  reject  as  incongruous  with  them- 
selves whatever  the  understanding  on  other  grounds  insists  should 
be  thrown  aside.  "  Upon  this  principle  we  are  to  deal  with  the 
Jewish  records  ;  they  explain  how  the  religious  feelings  of  a  certain 
nation  wTere  awakened ;  but  we  must  not  invest  them  with  an  ex- 
clusive dignity ;  we  must  not  make  Christianity  dependent  upon 
them.  The  affections  being  in  all  men,  every  history  and  every 
theology  will  contain  hints  of  the  efforts  which  men  have  made  to 
discover  what  they  needed  for  this  portion  of  their  being;  every 
scheme  of  philosophy  (though  philosophy  has  a  distinct  province  of 
its  own)  will  have  tried  to  methodize  these  hints.  Christianity 
must  be  looked  upon  as  the  announcement  to  men  of  what  they  had 
been  seeking  after." 

Though  some  of  these  views  may  be  very  offensive  to  those  who 
compose  the  evangelical  school  in  this  country,  they  certainly  have 
been  adopted  by  men  of  deep  thought  and  learning,  and  as  I  be- 
lieve of  simple,  earnest  piety,  in  the  most  thoughtful  country  of 
Europe,  as  the  only  scheme  of  theology  which  a  person  starting 
from  the  evangelical  premises,  and  admitting  no  others  to  be  sound 
and  true,  can  consistently  acknowledge.  And  I  do  not  believe  that 
the  history  of  the  progress  of  this  doctrine  in  the  country  which 
gave  it  birth,  will  prove  that  they  were  wrong.  If  indeed  it  be 
asked  whether  it  has  been  found  in  practice,  that  those  who  em- 
braced this  scheme  could  abide  in  it,  however  elaborated  and  fenced 
it  may  have  been  by  the  art  of  a  clear  logical  understanding,  sustain- 
ing a  devout  and  honest  heart,  I  imagine  the  answer  would  be,  No. 
Those  who  have  taken  up  this  theory  have  been  compelled  either 
to  advance  or  to  retreat.  The  principle  of  it  is,  that  the  nMnifesta- 
tion  of  Christ  is  the  one  great  fact  in  the  Bible  history,  to  which  all 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS.  145 

others  are  subordinate,  and  which  we  may  continue  to  recognise, 
even  though  we  should  be  compelled  lo  reject  many  of  the  records 
which  have  been  supposed  to  foretell  it,  as  well  as  some  parts  of  the 
story  which  contains  it.    To  this  fact  the  believer  in  this  system 
clings  as  the  deliverance  from  large  Pantheistic  notions  about  the 
Godhead,  and  as  the  warrant  and  protection  for  that  personal  reli- 
gion which  he  takes  to  be  the  especial  characteristic  of  Protestant- 
ism.   But  in  following  out  the  plan  of  discriminating  between  that 
which  men  must  receive  as  congenial  to  their  inward  feelings  and 
wants,  and  that  which  belongs  only  to  outward  form  and  history,  it 
has  been  found  that  the  recognition  of  a  personal  object  has  evap- 
orated altogether.    Our  Lord's  life  does  but  embody  certain  great 
ideas  and  principles,  which  have  been  at  work  in  men's  hearts  at 
all  times ;  which  probably  did  exhibit  themselves  very  remarkably 
in  Him,  and  may  have  seemed  to  his  affectionate,  credulous,  or  inter- 
ested disciples,  to  exhibit  themselves  in  Him  as  they  never  did  or 
could  in  any  other;  but  which  can  be  contemplated  by  us  apart 
from  the  accidental  form  which  they  assumed  in  that  or  in  any  age, 
as  principles  appertaining  to  our  general  humanity.    Such  is  one 
result  of  this  method — a  result,  it  will  be  seen,  as  directly  in  oppo- 
sition as  any  that  can  well  be  conceived  to  the  feelings  and  inten- 
tions of  its  originator,  and  which  yet  has  seemed  to  be  merely  a 
natural  deduction  from  it.    On  the  other  hand,  many  of  those  who 
would  have  been  most  inclined,  by  the  habits  of  their  minds  and 
the  mode  of  their  initiation  into  Christianity,  to  adopt  this  form  of 
theology,  and  who  probably  did  adopt  it,  have  been  led  more  and 
more  to  feel  that  the  doctrine  of  a  personal  manifestation  of  God 
cannot  rest  merely  upon  the  individual  experience  or  feeling  of  its 
necessity,  however  deeply  they  acknowledge  that  experience  in 
themselves  and  wTould  wTish  to  produce  it  in  others,  that  it  must  be 
sustained  by  a  still  more  awful  truth,  and  that  that  truth  must  in 
some  sense  have  been  given  to  men  in  order  that  they  might  enter 
into  it.    This,  I  apprehend,  is  a  faith  which  is  every  day  growing 
to  greater  strength  in  many  serious  German  minds,  and  which  must 
in  due  time  bear  important  fruits.    What  these  fruits  may  be,  I 
shall  not  here  inquire.    This  fact  I  conceive  is  at  all  events  estab- 
lished, tlft  as  there  is  a  Catholic  tendency  even  in  those  views  con- 
cerning spiritual  influence,  and  in  those  concerning  outward  organ- 
10 


146 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


ization,  which  seem  at  first  sight  to  be  of  the  most  exclusively  Pro- 
testant character,  so  likewise  there  is  a  Catholic  tendency  in  that 
theology  which  can  be  traced  most  directly  to  a  Protestant  origin. 
Even  that  system  which  builds  theology  upon  something  purely  in- 
ternal, yet  makes  the  idea  of  a  divine  manifestation  or  incarnation 
its  central  idea,  and  connects  with  this  the  use  of  outward  symbols, 
and  two  opposite  schemes  which  have  grown  up  by  the  side  of  it 
and  seem  to  have  developed  themselves  out  of  it  bear  unequivocal 
witness  that  Protestant  Germany  cannot  be  content  with  a  purely 
Protestant  system.  Catholicism  it  must  have  either  in  the  form  of 
Pantheism  or  of  definite  Christianity. 

I  said  that  Unitarianism  in  the  form  which  it  took  in  the  last  cen- 
tury was  crushed,  and  only  not  extinguished  by  the  Evangelical 
movement.  But  it  was  susceptible  of  another  form,  which  it  has 
assumed  among  the  descendants  of  the  English  Puritan  colonists  of 
North  America.  The  coating  of  dry  materialism  with  which  it 
was  associated,  and  from  which  it  appeared  to  be  inseparable,  has 
been  cast  away ;  the  orthodox  systems  are  charged  by  the  modern 
Unitarians  with  a  disregard  of  man's  spiritual  nature  and  his  spirit- 
ual powers ;  the  idea  of  a  divine  humanity  in  one  person  is  only 
rejected  because  it  interferes  with  the  acknowledgment  of  it  in 
every  one.  It  is  not  pretended  by  these  teachers  that  the  idea  of 
the  Divine  Being  can  be  otherwise  than  a  mysterious  idea ;  no  at- 
tempt is  made  to  refute  the  old  doctrine  of  Christendom  by  exhib- 
iting its  absurd  inconsistency  with  notions  which  are  applicable  to 
sensible  things;  it  is  rather  accused  of  being  formal  and  systematic, 
of  making  accurate  distinctions  when  all  ought  to  be  left  vague 
and  indeterminate.  Sabellianism  has  in  fact  superseded  Socinian- 
ism. 

The  views  of  the  modern  school  respecting  the  world  or  the  age, 
are  also  different  from  those  of  their  predecessors.  Every  thing  is 
growing  and  progressive ;  the  existing  age  sees  further  than  its 
predecessors,  and  can  afford  to  reject  much  which  they  believed. 
But  the  age  is  only  to  be  contemplated  in  a  few  illuminated  persons 
who  are  setting  themselves  in  opposition  to  the  ordinary  feelings 
and  habits  of  their  contemporaries.  The  idea  of  an  Ecclesia  has 
come  to  light  in  another  form,  and  in  a  very  remarkable  form,  for 
it  is  assumed  that  the  Ecclesia  (a  very  narrow  and  exclusive  one, 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


147 


consisting  of  men  of  genius  and  intellect,)  is  the  proper  world  of 
which  what  is  called  the  world  is  only  the  counterfeit.  Such  is 
modern  Unitarianism,  against  which  the  different  sects  in  America 
feel  that  they  have  need  to  strive  with  great  earnestness,  and  of 
which  they  say,  I  believe  most  truly,  that  it  makes  quite  as  little 
appeal  to  the  conscience,  has  as  little  to  do  with  the  life  and  heart 
of  men,  as  that  which  it  has  succeeded.  The  wise  members  of 
these  sects  affirm,  (experience  will  soon  show  whether  they  are 
mistaken,)  that  between  this  Unitarianism  and  Pantheism  there  is 
only  an  imaginary  boundary  which  must  soon  be  transgressed.  But 
neither  of  their  assertions  acts  with  any  great  power  as  a  check 
upon  the  progress  of  the  system.  The  Americans  are  craving  for 
something  which  is  Catholic,  and  not  sectarian.  This  system  ap- 
pears to  have  that  merit,  and  it  is  a  common  opinion,  that  either 
Unitarianism  or  Romanism  will  overspread  America,  or  that  the 
two  will  divide  it  between  them.  If  there  be  no  Catholicism  which 
is  not  identical  with  one  of  these  schemes,  I  cannot  doubt  that  they 
are  right. 

Some  allusion  has  been  made  to  a  feeling  of  discontent  in  the 
minds  of  earnest  and  pious  Scotchmen  with  the  Necessitarian  sys- 
tem, which  has  assumed  in  that  country  the  name  and  reputation 
of  the  old  Calvinism.  There,  as  in  Germany,  though  for  some- 
what different  reasons,  men  cannot  be  content  with  mere  indivi- 
dual feelings  or  mere  schemes  of  action  ;  they  require  a  theology. 
Now  the  great  solitary  principle  of  Scotch  theology,  that  the  Will 
of  God  is  the  original  to  which  every  thing  that  is  real  in  the  uni- 
verse or  in  man  must  be  referred,  may,  as  we  have  seen,  take  two 
entirely  opposite  forms.  It  may  be  an  assertion,  that  there  is  a 
Sovereign  over  the  world  who  disposes  of  all  things  and  persons 
according  to  his  pleasure  ;  it  may  be  an  assertion,  that  there  is  one 
from  whom  all  good  is  derived,  all  evil  being  the  contrary  of  his 
nature  and  the  resistance  to  his  purpose.  As  the  former  of  these 
views  became  more  and  more  characteristic  of  the  new  Calvinism, 
the  latter  began  to  be  proclaimed  as  the  only  principle,  which  is 
consistent  with  Scripture  by  a  small  minority  of  Scotch  divines, 
whose  zeal,  love,  and  in  many  cases  knowledge  also,  compensated 
for  their  numerical  weakness.  After  a  short  but  violent  struggle, 
they  were  generally  excluded  from  the  Kirk  ;  the  doctrine  of  the 


148 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


Universal  Love  of  God  being  declared  to  be  incompatible  with  its 
formularies  and  its  existence.  But  the  fact  that  such  a  principle 
once  proclaimed  can  never  be  suppressed  by  any  efforts  of  any 
body  of  men,  is  not  the  only  one  which  makes  this  apparently  in- 
significant demonstration  of  great  importance  to  those  who  are 
taking  account  of  the  religious  tendencies  of  this  age.  We  have 
seen  how  the  idea  of  the  incarnation  or  manifestation  of  God,  in 
the  person  of  man,  has  presented  itself  to  the  Evangelical  Germans 
as  that  which  must  be  the  groundwork  of  religion,  if  there  be  a 
religion,  and  how  remarkably  this  question,  whether  the  incarna- 
tion be  a  fact  or  only  a  dream,  has  become  the  turning  point  of  all 
theological  controversies  there.  Thus  that  Church  body  which 
was  created  to  witness  of  justification  by  faith,  has  found  that  it 
must  have  a  deeper  ground  than  this  to  rest  upon,  if  it  rest  at  all. 
Again  we  have  seen  how  among  the  Unitarians  in  America — the 
body  which  imagined  that  it  existed  to  protest  against  the  possi- 
bility of  God  taking  the  nature  of  man — language  has  become 
prevalent  and  popular  which,  however  vague  and  however  unlike 
the  doctrine  of  a  divine  humiliation,  yet  involves  all  the  difficulty 
and  mystery  belonging  to  that  doctrine.  Yet  neither  of  these 
changes  seem  to  me  so  remarkable  as  the  fact,  that  Scotchmen, 
trained  from  their  infancy  to  look  upon  the  fall  of  man  as  the  only 
foundation  of  divinity,  and  upon  the  incarnation  as  only  intelligible 
when  regarded  as  a  means  of  deliverance  from  the  effects  of  it, 
should  have  been  led  to  acknowledge  this  as  the  central  truth,  and 
to  exhibit  all  other  truths  in  the  light  of  it.  Now  this  is  the  case 
with  those  I  have  spoken  of  as  protesting  against  the  Calvinism  of 
modern  Scotland  ;  all  without  exception  have  spoken  of  the  divine 
manifestation  in  Christ  as  that  which  constitutes  Christianity. 
But  it  was  remarkably  the  case  with  the  Scotch  divine,  whose 
name,  for  good  and  for  evil,  is  best  known  in  this  country,  and 
whose  thoughts  have  left  upon  many  minds  traces  which  will 
remain  long  after  the  body  which  bears  his  name  shall  have  been 
forgotten.  The  late  Mr.  Irving,  bred  in  the  straitest  school  of 
Presbyterianism,  and  retaining,  I  believe  to  the  last,  a  vehement 
admiration  for  Knox  and  his  principles,  was  yet  led  to  adopt  the 
conviction,  that  the  doctrine  of  the  Incarnation  had  been  strangely 
kept  out  of  sight  in  all  Protestant  systems  ;  that  it  is  the  centre  of 


RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENTS. 


149 


all  divinity  ;  the  deeper  mystery  of  the  Trinity  being  at  once  the 
foundation  upon  which  it  rests,  and  the  truth,  to  the  full  knowledge 
and  fruition  of  which  it  is  to  lead  us.  In  the  attempt  to  reassert 
this  doctrine,  he  was  betrayed,  it  is  well  known,  into  the  use  of 
strange  and  perilous  language,  which  was  vehemently  attacked 
and  often  greatly  misrepresented — language  which  a  man  will,  I 
believe,  inevitably  adopt  who  has  not  quite  divested  himself  of  the 
notion  that  the  Fall  is  the  law  of  the  universe,  and  is  trying  to 
reconcile  that  Calvinistical  theory  with  the  Catholic  faith.  But 
Mr.  Irving  was  not  content  with  the  bare  proclamation  of  a  prin- 
ciple. He  felt  that  this  principle  must  be  the  foundation  of  one 
Catholic  Church  ;  that  if  a  Church  existed,  this  must  be  the  truth 
on  which  it  rests ;  that  if  this  be  a  truth,  there  must  be  a  Church. 
No  man  had  taken  more  pains  to  proclaim  the  coming  of  a  future 
and  perfect  dispensation.  But  he  found  that  the  mere  prospect  of 
a  Church  did  not  satisfy  the  language  of  Scripture,  nor  the  faith  of 
one  who  had  really  believed  in  a  divine  humanity.  The  existence 
of  such  a  divine  humanity  was  not  a  prospect,  but  a  reality  ;  facts 
had  attested  it ;  the  society  which  was  built  upon  it  must  be  a  fact 
too.  But  such  a  Church,  he  contended,  does  not  exist ;  it  has 
been,  but  it  has  ceased,  or  is  on  the  point  of  ceasing  to  be  ;  it  must 
then  be  restored  ;  it  can  only  be  restored  by  a  divine  intervention. 
There  must  be  a  fact  embodying  the  principle  of  a  union  of  God 
with  man  which  is  the  Church  ;  this  is  the  incarnation  ;  there 
must  be  an  organized  body  built  upon  that  fact ;  there  must  be 
the  manifestation  of  a  spiritual  power  to  attest  its  existence,  and  to 
enable  its  respective  members  to  perform  their  functions.  The 
religious  public  of  England  might  safely  indulge  their  humour,  if 
there  be  ever  safe  occasions  for  jesting,  with  the  evidence  which 
the  disciples  of  this  system  produced  to  show  that  they  had  been 
constituted  the  Church  of  God  in  the  world.  But  I  maintain  that 
this  public  cannot  set  at  naught  the  principles  which  led  men  to 
desire  such  evidence,  and  to  accept  almost  any  thing  as  if  it  were 
the  answer  to  their  wishes.  For  whereas  the  three  characteristics 
which  we  have  noticed  in  .our  modern  religious  movements,  the 
first,  the  recognition  of  a  spiritual  influence  ;  the  second,  the  de- 
mand for  an  outward  organization  ;  the  third,  the  craving  for  a 
positive  theology,  have  been  existing  hitherto  in  the  greatest  con- 


150  PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

tradiction  to  each  other ;  each  by  turns  putting  itself  forth  as  the 
great  necessity ;  each  by  turns  crushing  and  extinguishing  the 
others ;  here  was  an  attempt  to  combine  them  all,  and  to  exhibit 
them  in  that  relation  which  I  think  we  all  feel  to  be  the  right  one. 
If  then  there  be  a  falsehood  in  a  conception  which  seems  to  unite 
so  many  elements,  all  indispensable,  yet  unsociable — and  every 
fact  in  the  history  of  Irvingism  convinces  me  that  there  is  a  great 
and  terrible  falsehood — one  would  think  it  must  be  in  the  assump- 
tion, that  there  is  not  already  a  Catholic  Church  which  is  grounded 
upon  a  theological  truth,  possesses  a  divine  organization,  and  is 
endowed  with  the  living  Spirit ;  and  that,  therefore,  it  is  to  be 
founded  in  the  nineteenth  century. 


SECTION  II. 

PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 
Feelings  respecting  man — Poetry  and  criticism — Pure  metaphysics — Eclecticism. 

I.  At  the  time  when  Wesley  and  his  fellow-labourers  were 
proclaiming  the  doctrine  of  Spiritual  Power  and  Influence  with  so 
much  of  energy  and  practical  demonstration,  the  common  faith 
among  philosophical  men  was,  that  man  is  a  mere  creature  of  flesh 
and  blood.  It  might  be  only  in  the  enlightened  coteries  of  France 
that  this  doctrine  was  proclaimed  in  its  breadth  and  fulness ;  only 
in  them  was  it  clearly  understood  how  to  the  processes  of  digestion, 
or  rather  to  the  mass  of  matter  in  which  these  strange  processes  go 
on,  may  be  referred  the  phenomena  of  thinking,  hoping,  loving ; 
elsewhere  it  was  more  or  less  confidently  received  as  an  article  of 
faith,  that  there  dwells  in  our  bodily  frame,  a  thing  called  a  soul, 
which  is  known  chiefly  by  certain  negative  definitions,  and  which 
will  survive  death.  Nevertheless  the  Encyclopedists  did  but  ex- 
press, in  the  shape  of  a  proposition,  that  which  was  the  habit  of 
feeling  in  the  age  to  which  they  belonged.  "  Given  matter,  to 
find  whether  there  is  any  thing  besides,  or  whether  all  things  may 
be  reduced  under  its  forms;"  this  was  the  problem  which  the  men 
of  that  time  imagined  had  been  set  before  them  to  solve  in  whatever 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


151 


way  they  could.   The  experiments  which  were  made  by  those  who 
were  willing  in  argument  to  start  from  these  premises  are,  it  seems 
to  me,  profoundly  interesting ;  the  results  to  which  they  led  most 
satisfactory.    Among  these  we  must  reckon  Hutcheson's  discovery 
of  a  Moral  Sense,  and  Butler's  of  a  Conscience.    Discoveries  I 
have  a  right  to  call  them,  for  though  the  facts  which  were  affirmed 
had  once  been  taken  for  granted,  they  had  become  a  terra  incog- 
nita ;  nay,  one  which,  according  to  the  charts  then  received,  could 
not  exist.    But  like  many  great  facts  in  the  physical  world,  these 
were  supported  by  evidence  which  had  much  more  weight  with 
the  next  generation  than  with  the  one  to  which  it  was  addressed, 
and  the  principle  was  tacLly  recognised  that  the  material  is  at  all 
events  the  substantial  point  of  man  ;  that  what  is  spiritual,  if  it  ex- 
ist at  all,  is  only  his  accident.    Nay,  this  doctrine,  though  refuted 
by  all  the  conduct  and  by  much  of  the  language  of  those  who  took 
part  in  the  evangelical  movement,  yet  formed  a  very  considerable 
element  in  their  opinions.    They  taught  men  that  the  soul  was  all 
in  all ;  that  every  thing  was  to  be  postponed  to  the  salvation  of  the 
soul ;  that  all  men  had  souls  ;  and  that  the  majority  of  men  were 
guilty  of  neglecting  their  souls  ;  yet  if  they  had  been  asked  wheth- 
er they  really  looked  upon  men  generally  as  spiritual  beings,  they 
would  have  been  at  a  loss  to  know  what  the  question  could  mean. 
"  Spiritual  beings!"  they  would  have  exclaimed,  "no,  indeed  ;  an 
unconverted  man,  a  man  who  has  not  been  brought  under  the  influence 
of  divine  grace,  is  simply  a  carnal  being  ;  there  is  nothing  spiritual 
about  him."    They  knew  that  this  language  in  some  sense  was 
true;  they  knew  that  it  denoted  something  real,  and  the  habits  of 
their  time  hindered  them  from  perceiving  the  contradiction  which 
lay  concealed  in  it.    "  What,"  they  would  have  said,  "  is  philoso- 
phy to  us  ?  all  we  want  is  to  declare  the  truth  of  the  Gospel."  But 
philosophy  was  very  much  to  them  notwithstanding  ;  the  material- 
istic philosophy  had  unconsciously  a  great  hold  upon  their  minds, 
and  it  may  be  safely  affirmed,  that  the  most  extravagant  notions 
and  acts  which  can  be  charged  upon  them,  arose  from  the  mingling 
of  this  philosophy  with  the  spiritual  maxims  which  they  had  de- 
rived from  Christianity.    It  seemed  so  utterly  strange  to  men  in  the 
18th  century,  that  human  beings  should  exhibit  any  spiritual  feel- 
ings or  energies,  that  the  appearance  of  them  was  almost  necessa- 


152 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


rily  looked  upon  as  something  not  wonderful  merely,  but  startling ; 
not  as  the  effect  of  a  divine  influence  merely,  but  of  a  magi- 
cal one. 

The  Methodists,  however,  led  other  men  into  a  belief  which 
they  did  not  entertain  themselves ;  they  were  the  unconscious  and 
unacknowledged,  but  not  the  least  powerful  instruments  of  a  great 
change  in  the  views  of  philosophers.  It  is  difficult  to  determine 
when  a  change  of  this  kind  may  be  said  to  have  actually  taken 
place ;  in  other  words,  when  a  principle  which  has  long  struggled 
with  opposition  and  ridicule  may  be  treated  as  the  recognised  and 
popular  creed.  The  generally  admitted  test  is  this.  As  long  as  a 
doctrine  is  held  only  in  such  a  country  as  Germany,  a  country  of  re- 
cluse students,  so  long  it  cannot  be  said  to  belong  to  the  age.  But 
so  soon  as  it  has  become  the  common  talk  and  profession  of  the  lec- 
turers and  coteries  of  France,  we  may  be  sure  that  it  has  established 
its  claim  to  that  distinction,  notwithstanding  any  resistance  it  may  still 
encounter  from  the  opinions  and  habits  which  have  been  bequeathed 
by  previous  generations.  And  this  test  is  especially  applicable  to 
the  doctrine  that  man  is  to  be  spoken  of  as  a  spiritual  being.  The 
materialism  which  the  last  age  implicitly  adopted  did  not  fully  de- 
velope  itself  in  that  age;  the  successors  of  the  Encyclopedists  car- 
ried their  doctrines  even  further  than  they  had  done,  and  proclaimed 
them  with  even  more  confidence.  Nevertheless,  they  have  been 
losing  ground  every  hour  for  the  last  len  or  twelve  years  in  the  coun- 
try which  seemed  to  belong  to  them  ;  till  there  is  scarcely  a  sub- 
ject, not  even  that  of  physiology  and  medicine,  on  which  they  have 
not  been  vehemently  assaulted,  nay,  from  which  they  have  not 
been  almost  dislodged.  We  may,  therefore,  fairly  assume,  that  a 
philosophical  revolution  has  occurred,  quite  as  signal  as  that  which 
distinguished  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century,  though  of  a  di- 
rectly opposite  kind.  The  change  which  we  noticed  in  the  phrases  of 
Unitarians  and  in  the  whole  conception  of  their  system  is  an  index  of 
it,  and  may  help  us  to  understand  the  character  and  effects  of  it.  It 
does  not  consist  in  any  dry,  tame,  acknowledgment  that  man  has  an 
immortal  part  or  property  which  may  survive  the  dissolution  of  his 
animal  frame ;  it  amounts  to  nothing  less  than  a  distinct  affirmation, 
that  those  powers  and  properties  which  he  has  within  him,  of  which 
the  senses  can  take  no  account,  and  which  are  not  reducible  under 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


153 


any  mechanical  conditions,  are  what  constitute  him  a  man ;  and  that 
all  the  most  important  part  of  his  history  is  the  history  of  these 
powers,  of  the  restraints  to  which  they  have  been  subjected  and  of 
what  they  have  achieved.  A  dynamical  philosophy  has  gradually 
superseded  a  mechanical  one  in  those  countries  where  philosophy 
is  considered  of  a  distinct  substantive  value,  and  in  spite  of  the  in- 
fluence of  trade  proper,  and  trade  political,  is  endeavouring  to  sup- 
plant it  in  England  also.  And  though  I  call  it  a  philosophy,  I 
mean  something  which  diffuses  itself  through  the  most  ordinary  and 
popular  literature,  and  has  created  a  language  for  itself,  which 
will  become  in  a  short  time,  if  it  have  not  become  already,  familiar 
to  clubs  and  drawing  rooms. 

This  language  will  of  course  very  often  touch  upon  points  which 
religious  men  have  thought  belonged  exclusively  to  them.  All  the 
facts  which  concern  the  internal  life  and  consciousness ;  all  the  re- 
ligious changes  which  have  taken  place  in  different  periods  of  soci- 
ety ;  all  the  personal  conflicts  of  Christians,  will  be  spoken  of  with 
the  deepest  interest,  as  being  vastly  more  important  than  accounts 
of  wars  and  state  intrigues  and  the  fall  of  empires.  Men  in  old 
times  will  be  admired  because  they  esteemed  themselves  the  sub- 
jects of  a  divine  inspiration,  and  faithfully  acted  upon  that  hypo- 
thesis. The  ages  in  which  faith  gave  place  to  infidelity  will  be 
denounced  as  barren  and  worthless.  It  will  be  affirmed  that  in  our 
day,  as  much  as  in  any  former  one,  men  ought  to  exercise  faith, 
and  to  look  upon  their  different  talents  as  marks  of  a  spiritual  voca- 
tion. In  such  expressions,  mingled  as  they  generally  are  with 
many  in  which  religious  men  can  have  no  sympathy,  it  is  common 
to  say  that  there  is  fraud  and  insincerity;  language  is  wilfully  per- 
verted to  mean  something  different  from  its  common  meaning.  In 
many  cases  there  may  doubtless  be  this  insincerity ;  the  more  fash- 
ionable the  tone  becomes,  the  more  of  it  there  will  be.  But  it  is 
dangerous  to  prefer  such  charges,  for  they  are  very  often  untrue, 
and  they  may  often  be  retaliated  upon  ourselves.  The  case  I  con- 
ceive stands  thus.  A  considerable  number  of  persons  in  Germany, 
in  France,  and  in  England,  believe  that  they  have  found  an  expla- 
nation for  most  or  all  of  the  facts  which  readers  of  the  Bible  attri- 
bute to  the  power  of  the  Spirit  of  God.  They  believe  that  the  last 
age  had  no  such  explanation,  and  that  its  attempts  to  interpret  or 


154 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


deny  these  facts  were  ridiculous.  Treating  human  beings,  they 
say,  merely  as  material  mechanical  creatures,  you  will  always  be 
puzzled  with  what  pious  people  tell  you  that  they  have  felt,  and 
with  what  they  have  actually  done ;  treat  them  as  spiritual  beings, 
and  the  difficulty  ceases.  You  cannot  account  for  every  thing ; 
their  divine  interventions,  spiritual  illuminations,  and  miracles,  were 
not  mere  inventions  of  priestcraft,  though  priestcraft  has  much  to 
do  with  the  continued  belief  of  them  ;  they  are  all  to  be  traced  to 
man's  spiritual  nature ;  by  observing  what  theory  prevailed  in  each 
age  on  such  matters  you  form  a  notion  of  its  character,  and  of  its 
relation  to  that  which  succeeded  it.  This  is  a  language  which  per- 
fectly satisfies  some  persons  who  can  put  all  these  subjects  at  a  dis- 
tance from  them,  and  speculate  about  them  with  entire  calmness. 
There  are  others,  on  the  contrary,  whose  phrases  will  often  be  very 
like  these — nay,  the  very  same — but  in  whom  they  are  indications 
of  an  entirely  different  state  of  mind.  These  are  men  who  do  not 
consider  it  their  duty  or  vocation  to  explain  away  facts,  or  to  phi- 
losophize upon  them ;  they  cannot  look  at  any  thing  as  apart  from 
themselves;  when  they  talk  of  sufferings  and  conflicts,  they  are  not 
expounding  a  scheme  of  metaphysics,  they  are  speaking  of  what 
they  have  known  and  what  they  can  therefore  sympathize  with  in 
others.  Such  persons  cannot  adopt  the  old  religious  language,  be- 
cause it  seems  to  set  aside  facts  which  they  feel  to  be  certain ;  it 
seems  to  deny  that  a  man  is  any  thing  in  himself;  that  he  has  an 
eye  wherewith  he  is  to  receive  light.  But  neither  can  they  wholly 
reject  this  old  religious  language;  they  feel  inwardly  that  the  phi- 
losophical is  no  substitute  for  it;  they  feel  that  the  words  about 
gifts  and  inspirations  did  mean  something  more  than  that  a  man 
has  all  powers  within  him;  they  feel  that  an  abdication  of  powers, 
a  denial  of  self,  is  the  characteristic  of  all  really  honest  men;  they 
feel  that  humility,  and  not  exaltation,  the  acknowledgment  of  re- 
ceiving, not  the  boast  of  possessing,  ought  to  be  the  criterion  of 
spiritual  excellence.  They,  therefore,  hover  between  the  two  forms 
of  language,  using  either  as  the  feeling  of  the  weakness  or  false- 
hood of  the  other  predominates,  often  committing  the  grossest  in- 
consistencies, often  uttering  the  most  absurd  extravagancies,  but 
proving  the  honesty  of  their  intentions  more  by  these  inconsisten- 
cies and  extravagancies  than  by  much  which  seems  to  their  ad- 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


155 


mirers  coherent  and  reasonable ;  and  I  believe  laying  religious 
men,  but  especially  divines,  under  an  obligation  to  inquire  what  this 
perplexity  means,  and  whether  their  own  modes  of  speaking  or 
thinking,  the  indistinctness  of  their  minds,  or  the  faithlessness  of 
their  hearts,  may  not  have  given  occasion  to  it. 

2.  I  attributed  much,  both  of  the  good  and  evil  which  distin- 
guished the  last  age,  to  the  exclusive  study  of  Natural  Philosophy. 
Self-forgetfulness  and  the  sense  of  something  permanent  and  abso- 
lute distinct  from  us,  accompanied  with  a  tendency  to  overlook  the 
importance  of  man  altogether,  and  to  regard  God  as  merely  a  syno- 
nyme  of  nature,  are  habits  of  mind,  which  seem  so  much  connect- 
ed with  this  pursuit,  that  wise  men  have  alternately  exalted  it  as 
the  one  pure  and  safe  region  for  the  soul  to  dwell  in,  and  have  fled 
from  it  as  dreary  and  infectious. 

In  our  day  the  most  vehement  efforts  have  been  made  by  eminent 
individuals  and  by  societies  to  assert  the  superiority  of  this  study  to 
all  others  ;  the  certainty  of  its  conclusions  and  its  progressive  im- 
provements have  been  set  in  strong  contrast  with  the  insecurity  of 
all  moral  principles,  when  they  are  not  mere  commonplaces,  equal- 
ly obvious  to  the  savage  and  the  sage ;  the  mighty  practical  results 
of  it,  which  every  one  must  recognise,  have  been  appealed  to  as 
proving  its  claim  to  be  the  useful,  and  therefore  the  precious  part  of 
knowledge.  Yet  all  these  arguments  and  encouragements  have 
been  insufficient  to  excite  any  ardent  zeal  for  it  in  the  minds  of 
those  young  men  who  most  represent  the  character  of  the  age,  or 
are  most  likely  to  stamp  it  with  their  own — insufficient  to  deter 
them  from  devoting  themselves  to  the  inquiries  and  speculations 
which  are  pronounced  to  be  without  any  present  advantage  or  pro- 
mise of  fruit  hereafter.  The  Utilitarian  does  not  acknowledge  the 
ad  hominem  appeal  of  the  natural  philosopher;  he  declares  that 
there  are  more  useful  studies  than  that  of  the  stars  or  of  strata. 
Religious  men  are  in  vain  besought  to  believe,  that  the  great  evi- 
dences of  the  divine  existence  and  character  are  to  be  found  in  the 
outward  universe  ;  their  tendency,  as  we  have  seen,  is  to  reflect 
almost  exclusively  upon  the  feelings  which  belong  to  themselves. 
But  above  all,  nature  itself  has  been,  to  a  very  great  extent,  con- 
quered from  the  natural  philosopher.  Sympathies  have  been  disco- 
vered between  the  beholder  and  the  objects  which  are  presented  to 


156 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


him,  and  attempts  to  express  these  sympathies  or  investigate  the 
conditions  and  laws  under  which  they  exist,  have  become  the  fa- 
vourite, are  threatening  to  become  the  exclusive,  occupation  of  the 
more  thoughtful  and  abstracted  men  in  this  time.  A  few  hints 
respecting  this  important  revolution  are  necessary  in  this  place.  I 
am  quite  unable  to  do  justice  to  the  subject ;  but  the  tendencies  of 
our  modern  poetry  and  criticism  cannot  be  overlooked  by  any  one 
who  is  studying  the  influences  which  are  acting  upon  himself  and 
his  fellows. 

From  about  the  middle  of  the  last  century,  we  may  trace  the 
commencement  of  a  poetry  which  had  a  much  more  direct  and 
substantive  reference  to  the  outward  universe  than  that  of  earlier 
periods.  The  doings  of  men,  as  well  as  the  songs  in  which  they 
wrere  celebrated,  had  become  artificial  and  conventional :  those 
whom  domestic  habits  had  inspired  with  a  dislike  of  the  hollowness 
of  general  society,  or  whom  their  early  cultivation  had  taught  to 
desire  something  more  living  and  permanent  than  the  modes  of  a 
particular  generation,  took  refuge  in  nature.  To  their  simple  and 
sincere  utterances  succeeded  violent  paroxysms  of  rapture,  concern- 
ing its  more  magnificent  images,  and  most  vague  and  abortive  efforts 
to  describe  them.  But  both  these  forms  of  writing  were  rather 
indications  that  a  new  state  of  feeling  was  at  hand  than  themselves 
the  expression  of  it.  Presently  European  society  was  shaken  by 
an  earthquake ;  conventions  were  loosened  or  dissolved  ;  the  links 
between  the  past  and  the  present  were  snapt  asunder ;  passions 
which  had  been  smothered  or  icebound  by  the  rules  of  etiquette 
broke  forth  ;  men  in  different  classes  remembered,  that  under  some 
conditions  or  other  they  had  common  rights  and  a  common  hu- 
manity ;  the  question  what  law  are  we  to  obey,  if  old  observances 
and  decorums  can  no  longer  command  us,  began  to  be  earnestly 
discussed.  The  admiration  and  love  of  nature  became  strangely 
connected  with  all  these  movements  of  the  human  heart  and  will, 
and  different  forms  of  poetry  appeared  to  illustrate  and  exhibit  the 
connection.  One  form  of  it  presented  us  with  chivalrous  legends 
of  other  days,  enabling  us  to  feel  that  there  was  still  a  bond  be_ 
tween  us  and  them,  though  the  institutions  which  they  had 
bequeathed  might  be  perishing.  In  this  poetry  scenes  in  nature 
came  forth  as  a  gallery  of  pictures,  which  had  lasted  for  genera- 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


157 


tions,  and  upon  which  the  heroes  as  well  as  the  readers  of  the  poem 
had  gazed.  Another  form  of  it  expressed  the  wailings  of  those 
who  had  been  prematurely  disgusted  with  society,  or  had  not  been 
able  to  reconcile  its  demands  with  their  desire  for  individual  inde- 
pendence. All  the  storms  and  tumults  in  nature  echoed  these  dis- 
contents and  discords ;  its  more  peaceful  scenes  were  welcomed  as 
the  only  medicine  for  them.  A  third  was  the  calm  utterance  of  a 
calm  mind,  which  had  sought  to  discover  what  bonds  of  fellowship 
existed  between  it  and  men  of  all  different  orders  and  degrees. 
Nature  was  evidently  a  common  thing  in  which  lord  and  peasant 
might  participate,  from  which  no  proscriptions  and  formalities 
could  exclude.  A  fourth  was  of  a  far  more  comprehensive,  if  not 
of  a  deeper  quality.  It  exhibited  the  efforts  of  a  profound  thinker 
to  find  a  principle  of  life  and  action,  and  that  principle  is  expressed 
in  some  such  language  as  this — The  'perfection  of  a  man  is  to  be  in 
harmony  with  nature. 

Here  then  we  are  arrived  at  a  result  towards  which  the  other 
experiments  were  evidently  tending — a  result  of  the  very  last  prac- 
tical importance — which  is  likely  to  produce  a  greater  influence  on 
the  period  which  follows  one  of  remarkable  poetical  genius  and 
activity  than  on  that  period  itself.  But  since  many  persons  find  it 
difficult  to  understand  how  works  of  the  imagination  can  have  become 
so  involved  with  views  belonging  directly  to  human  life  and  action — 
since  they  are  apt  to  suppose  that  the  only  moral  effect  of  such  works 
is  to  create  and  strengthen  good  or  bad  feelings  and  impressions, 
not  to  elucidate  or  to  establish  principles, — I  must  endeavour  to 
trace  the  steps  by  w^hich  they  have  acquired  this  new  character. 

In  the  last  age  it  was  customary  to  divide  men  of  letters  into 
two  classes — those  who  followed  the  vagrant  impulses  of  genius, 
and  those  who  were  content  to  subject  themselves  to  rules  and 
forms.  The  first  received  a  patronizing  and  qualified  admiration, 
but  they  were  beacons  rather  than  examples ;  the  latter  because 
they  had  less  originality  might  be  more  safely  followed.  The  im- 
pulse of  men  just  recovering  the  feeling  that  they  had  strange 
powers  within  them  was  exactly  to  reverse  this  decision,  to  assert 
the  prerogatives  of  genius,  to  boast  of  its  chartered  libertinism,  and 
to  denounce  forms  as  inconsistent  with  it.  But  this  is  a  language 
which  cannot  last  long :  when  men  began  to  compare  the  writings 


158 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


which  have  stood  for  ages  with  those  which  affect  their  nature  and 
freedom,  it  was  perceived  that  the  secret  of  power  does  not  lie  in 
its  carelessness  or  vagrancy ;  that  wantonness  is  allied  to  weak- 
ness ;  that  it  is  the  very  characteristic  of  genius  to  own  principles, 
not  to  despise  them.  It  has  been  shown  that  the  last  age  was  not 
at  all  too  careful  in  asserting  the  existence  of  laws  to  which  all 
art  and  poetry  must  conform  itself;  it  only  mistook  the  character 
of  those  laws ;  it  supposed  them  to  be  mere  rules  respecting  the 
outsides  of  expression  and  construction,  not  forms  belonging  to  the 
thought  and  mind  itself.  If  there  be  such  principles  and  forms, 
then  the  intuition  of  them,  accompanied  with  the  capacity  of  work- 
ing according  to  them,  is  the  very  quality  of  genius,  and  the  study 
of  works  of  genius  in  a  spirit  of  submission,  not  of  dictation,  is  the 
way  of  obtaining  that  knowledge  which  the  artificer  possessed. 
There  may  be  a  purely  creative  intuition  which  does  not  necessarily 
imply  consciousness  of  the  laws  which  it  follows ;  there  may  be  a 
critical  intuition  which  discovers  them  after  they  have  been  already 
exhibited  in  practice,  and  is  not  necessarily  associated  with  the 
faculty  of  embodying  that  which  it  recognises;  but  the  critic  is  no 
further  a  judge  of  the  poet  than  as  he  is  able  to  perceive  when  he 
has  departed  from  the  principles  which  give  coherency  and  har- 
mony to  his  work.  These  doctrines,  which  seem  to  carry  in  them 
a  witness  of  their  truth,  a  witness  confirmed  as  much  by  the  success 
of  those  who  have  followed  them  in  their  criticism  of  great  authors 
as  by  the  feebleness  and  confusions  of  their  predecessors,  have, 
however,  necessarily  led  to  further  reflections.  What  are  these 
laws  and  forms,  and  where  are  they  to  be  sought  for  1  Are  they 
laws  of  nature,  or  laws  of  the  mind  ?  Is  the  man  of  genius  the 
author  of  them,  or  does  he  merely  perceive  them,  and  adapt  him- 
self to  them  ?  It  has  been  found  impossible  to  affirm  either  posi- 
tion— to  adopt  either  form  of  language  as  the  sufficient  and  exclu- 
sive one.  Those  who  endeavour  to  do  so,  are  soon  seen  to  contra- 
dict themselves ;  some  unconscious  phrase  asserts  in  one  sentence 
that  which  was  denied  in  the  previous  one.  It  seems  to  follow7, 
that  the  law  of  the  imagination  is  a  law  of  fellowship  or  intercom- 
munion with  nature ;  you  cannot  describe  it  in  any  terms  which  do 
not  imply  this  to  be  the  case;  you  cannot  go  deeper  than  to  say,  that  it 
creates  only  so  far  as  it  sees,  and  that  it  sees  only  so  far  as  it  has 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS.  159 

the  faculty  of  creating;  just  as  sight  and  sound  can  neither  be 
predicated  solely  of  the  eye  nor  of  the  thing  beheld — of  the  ear 
nor  of  the  thing  heard,  but  are  the  product  of  both. 

Now  if  we  admit,  as  I  think  we  may,  that  the  clear  apprehen- 
sion of  this  position,  and  of  the  manifold  consequences  which  flow 
from  it  in  reference  to  poetry  and  the  arts  generally,  has  been  re- 
served for  our  time  ;  that  as  it  was  the  characteristic  task  of  the  last 
age  to  discover  the  laws  of  the  physical  world,  as  it  is  in  itself,  so 
it  has  been  the  characteristic  task  of  this  age  to  investigate  the  re- 
lations in  which  men  stand  to  that  physical  world  ;  we  need  not 
wonder  if  this  study,  like  the  other,  should  seem  to  those  who  have 
made  any  proficiency  in  it  all  satisfying,  if  it  should  seem  to  them 
to  determine  the  very  ends  and  conditions  of  man's  being.  No  one 
who  has  considered  thoughtfully  the  history  of  astronomy,  of  logic, 
or  of  political  economy,  would  be  surprised  to  hear  that  any  study 
in  any  age  has  assumed  to  itself  the  character  of  the  universal,  all- 
including  study.  But  in  this  case  I  cannot  help  feeling  that  there 
is  still  a  stronger  reason.  I  cannot  but  think  that  those  who  have 
detected  this  law  of  the  imagination — this  law  of  sympathy  and 
communion  between  themselves  and  that  which  is  distinct  from 
them,  have  been  assailed  by  a  conviction  which  they  cannot  resist 
or  part  with,  that  some  such  law  of  communion  is  the  law  of  their 
whole  life ;  that  life  is  an  unintelligible  blank  without  it ;  that  here 
must  be  the  key  to  its  deepest  mysteries.  Neither  can  I  doubt  that 
they  feel  they  have  been  in  some  way  or  other  robbed  and  cheated 
of  this  truth,  and  that  it  is  time  to  assert  it,  or  recover  it.  And, 
therefore,  when  I  hear  persons  affirming,  that  harmony  with  nature 
or  the  universe  is  the  great  attainment  of  the  wisest  and  greatest 
man;  when  I  hear  them  drawing  from  this  proposition  the  natural 
corollary,  that  the  artist  or  poet  is  the  elect  man — the  demigod  of 
the  world ;  when  I  hear  it  maintained,  that  all  the  religious  systems 
which  have  existed  have  been  attempts  to  embody  a  theory  of 
man's  relations  with  this  universe;  that  the  forms  which  are  suita- 
ble to  express  these  relations  in  one  age  become  unsuitable  in  an- 
other ;  that  the  gifted  man  knows  at  what  moment  the  old  forms 
have  worn  themselves  out,  and  must  be  rejected  and  new  forms 
must  be  invented ;  when  I  hear  such  language  as  this — though  I 
believe  that  greater  danger  lurks  in  it  than  in  any  phrases  which 


160  PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

have  ever  been  current  in  any  age — though  it  seems  to  me  likely 
to  subvert  all  acknowledgment  of  fixed,  unchangeable  truth,  and 
to  perpetuate  and  sanctify  that  tyranny  of  modes  and  fashions 
against  which  it  feigns  to  protest — I  yet  cannot  treat  it  merely  as 
the  quackery  of  talking  men,  merely  as  the  fanaticism  of  men  who 
have  seen  one  fact  and  wish  to  explain  all  facts  by  that ;  still  less 
merely  as  a  deliberate  wickedness  which  wishes  to  undermine  the 
faith  of  mankind  under  a  show  of  paying  it  compliments.  There 
may  be  persons  in  abundance  who  practise  this  quackery,  are  pos- 
sessed by  this  fanaticism,  and  hope  to  accomplish  this  wicked  de- 
sign ;  but  they  did  not  invent  these  expressions,  they  have  only 
adopted  them  as  they  would  in  the  last  age  have  adopted  its  cant 
which  they  now  can  afford  to  despise.  The  sincere  minds  who 
have  given  currency  to  this  tone  of  thought  and  speech,  or  to  whom 
it  conveys  a  real  meaning,  will  exhibit  their  difference  from  the  rest 
by  their  inconsistency.  At  one  moment  you  will  hear  them  pro- 
claim harmony  with  nature  to  be  the  great  object  of  all  men's 
strivings ;  the  next  you  will  find  them  expressing  the  deepest  ad- 
miration for  those  who  have  believed  that  they  were  sent  into  the 
world  to  contend  writh  all  those  inclinations  and  appetites  which 
connected  them  with  nature  and  the  outward  world ;  wrho  believed 
this  to  be  the  characteristic  glory  of  men,  and  who  exhorted  others 
to  be  men  by  doing  the  like.  One  while  they  worship  the  artist 
because  he  submitted  himself  to  nature,  one  wrhile  because  he  hum- 
bled nature  to  himself,  and  created  it  afresh ;  first  they  will  speak 
as  if  the  universe  were  created  that  poets  and  artists  might  live  and 
reign,  and  as  if  all  who  had  not  their  faculty,  or  the  faculty  of  ad- 
miring and  worshipping  them,  ought  to  be  hunted  out  of  it ;  then 
they  will  declare  that  the  great  difference  between  these  poets  and 
artists  and  others  is,  that  they  have  more  sense  of  a  common  hu- 
manity, and  that  there  ought  to  be  a  spiritual  commonwealth  in 
which  the  meanest  labourer  and  serf  should  feel  that  he  had  a  por- 
tion. Now  they  can  interpret  all  religious  systems  as  imperfect  at- 
tempts to  explain  the  relations  between  man  and  the  universe,  and 
to  embody  the  sense  of  those  relations  in  certain  forms ;  presently 
you  will  find  them  extolling  some  great  Reformer  or  Iconoclast, 
whose  peculiarity  has  been,  that  he  utterly  repudiated  those  parts  of 
the  popular  system  which  were  the  links  between  man  and  nature, 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS.  161 

as  the  spurious  outgrowths  of  a  later  time  when  men  had  lost  their 
sense  of  a  connection  with  a  Being  above  themselves,  and  therefore 
had  bowed  down  to  images  and  likenesses  of  the  things  below  them  ; 
and  that  he  reasserted  the  worth  and  meaning  of  those  old  forms 
which  witnessed  for  the  fact  of  that  higher  relation. 

These  are  strange  inconsistencies,  but  they  are  honourable 
inconsistencies  ;  they  prove  those  who  commit  them  to  be  earnestly 
and  affectionately  desirous  to  hold  what  is  true,  even  when  it  crosses 
and  interferes  with  views  which  they  regard,  or  think  they  regard, 
as  the  climax  of  all  past  discoveries  and  revelations.  And  there- 
fore it  is  impossible  not  to  believe  that  there  is  something  in  these 
views  which  ought  to  be  upheld,  and  which  may  be  upheld,  not 
amidst  contradictions  which  make  the  practical  application  of  them 
impossible,  but  in  conjunction  with  principles  which  determine 
their  meaning  and  prove  their  reality.  We  cannot  say  to  these 
men,  You  must  cast  aside  this  faith  in  the  existence  of  bonds  between 
man  and  the  universe  ;  these  bonds  exist — they  have  been  felt  and 
realized  — the  more  they  are  felt  and  realized  the  better.  Neither 
can  we  say  to  them,  There  is  an  individual  soul  in  you  which  is 
more  precious  to  you  than  all  these  bonds  ;  they  will  go  all  lengths 
with  you  in  tbat  affirmation  ;  they  have  been  generally  bred  in  a 
school  of  pure,  exclusive  Protestantism  ;  they  believe  in  this  indi- 
vidual soul ;  they  all  but  worship  it.  Nevertheless  they  feel  that 
there  are  human  bonds — bonds  not  merely  for  the  individual  soul, 
but  for  humanity  ;  they  feel  that  these  must  be  acknowledged  quite 
as  much  as  the  needs  of  the  individual  soul ;  that  that  soul  does 
itself  witness  of  them.  But  they  have  been  told  by  their  Protestant 
teachers,  that  there  are  no  sucb  bonds  between  humanity  and  God  ; 
He  is  connected  only  with  the  individual ;  all  forms  signifying  any 
more  general  relation  than  this,  are  unmeaning  and  obsolete. 
They  have  been  told  this ;  they  have  learnt  the  lesson ;  tney 
believe  it  as  heartily  as  such  a  lesson  can  be  believed.  Only  they 
believe  also,  that  if  this  be  true,  then  humanity  must  seek  its  hap- 
piness in  fellowship  with  something  else  than  God,  or  rather  must 
make  its  god  or  its  gods  out  of  objects  which  can  have  living 
intercourse  with  it.  And  strangely  agonizing  as  the  thought  may 
be,  that  after  all,  this  humanity  has  had  nothing  firm  to  rest  upon 
or  to  commune  with ;  that  the  only  objects  it  could  admire  and 

11 


162 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


love  have  been  changing  their  aspects  continually,  and  have  re- 
ceived their  beauty  from  the  mind  of  the  beholder ;  that  therefore 
the  idols  have  been  changed  with  every  new  period  ;  and  that  the 
incalculably  few  men  who  could  discern  a  meaning  in  those  things 
they  conversed  with,  have  been  the  real  gods — because  the  god- 
makers  of  the  universe — painful  as  it  may  be  thus  practically  to 
deny  the  existence  of  any  constant  being  who  has  held  the  frag- 
ments of  humanity  together,  even  while  you  are  in  the  very  act  of 
asserting  that  they  are  bound  together,  and  thus  to  treat  the  idolatry 
which  has  been  the  apparent  cause  of  all  its  divisions,  as  the  one 
only  explanation  of  its  unity,  even  this  must  be  borne,  because 
facts  seem  to  enforce  these  conclusions  though  conscience  and  reason 
may  revolt  against  them.  Is  it  not  the  fact,  say  these  men,  that 
all  Protestant  systems — the  last  the  most  perfect  attempts  at  a 
religious  system — are  crumbling  in  pieces  1  They  have  swallowed 
up  all  previous  forms  of  faith,  now  they  are  proving  themselves  to 
be  weak  and  good  for  nothing.  Men  have  discovered  wants  in 
themselves  which  such  systems  cannot  satisfy  ;  it  is  idle  to  pretend 
that  these  narrow  platforms  can  ever  be  a  ground  for  mankind  to 
rest  upon ;  they  are  not  wide  enough  for  a  few  individuals  to  stand 
together  upon  without  quarrelling  and  kicking.  Their  very  merit 
consisted  in  the  exclusiveness,  as  well  of  their  admissions  as  of 
their  objects.  A  few  who  have  particular  sympathies  on  certain 
points  of  religion,  are  drawn  together  in  them ;  but  the  study  of 
nature,  of  art,  of  man,  they  confess,  belongs  to  another  sphere 
from  theirs ;  they  may  tolerate  it,  or  prohibit  it,  but  with  it  their 
religion  or  their  fellowship  has  nothing  to  do,  or  if  they  do  endea- 
vour to  find  a  connection  it  is  by  making  these  studies  dishonest ; 
by  compelling  them  to  say  what  they  do  not  say  ;  by  changing 
their  object  from  the  investigation  of  truth  into  the  confirmation  of 
certain  pre-established  maxims.  This  is  language  which  we  may 
hear  in  all  quarters.  I  beseech  divines,  and  the  men  who  influence 
the  religious  feelings  of  this  age,  earnestly  to  ponder  it,  and  to 
consider  what  it  indicates. 

3.  Before  either  of  the  tendencies  of  which  I  have  been  speak- 
ing had  decidedly  manifested  itself,  the  question  respecting  the 
grounds  of  knowledge  which  was  supposed  to  be  settled  by  Locke, 
had  been  submitted  to  a  new  and  a  most  rigid  examination.  For 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


163 


a  long  time  a  ridiculous  notion  prevailed  here,  and  in  Scotland,  in 
reference  to  the  eminent  German  thinker  who  conducted  this  inves- 
tigation. It  was  seriously  believed  that  he  had  been  swTayed  by 
the  impulses  of  a  vagrant  and  mystical  imagination  .  .  .  nay  even 
philosophical  writers  were  not  ashamed  to  insinuate  that  the  British 
public  might  form  a  tolerably  fair  conception  of  the  metaphysics 
of  their  neighbours,  from  the  wild  freaks  which  were  exhibited  in 
the  fictions  of  some  of  their  least  cultivated  or  most  immature 
poets.  It  is  now,  however,  well  understood  that  the  persons  who 
sanctioned  this  pious  fraud  were  really  deterred  from  the  study  of 
this  author,  not  by  the  looseness,  but  by  the  severity  of  his  logic ; 
by  the  absence  in  him  of  all  those  vague  and  popular  modes  of 
thought  and  speech  to  which  they  had  accustomed  themselves,  and 
their  readers.  He  entered  upon  his  inquiry  with  no  theological 
bias  which  could  make  him  averse  from  the  system  of  Locke 
merely  because  it  had  led  to  infidel  results  ;  with  the  very  strongest 
dislike  of  a  system  which  an  earlier  German  philosopher  had  set 
up  in  opposition  to  the  worship  of  experience ;  with  a  conscience 
which  admonished  him  to  reject  every  customary  notion  and  opinion 
if  it  hindered  him  in  the  pursuit  of  truth  ;  with  an  understanding 
adapted  to  the  most  calm  and  patient  analysis.  Those  who 
understand  most  thoroughly  the  tests  by  which  physical  facts  and 
laws  have  been  ascertained,  will  probably  pay  most  respect  to  the 
course  of  critical  inquiry  which  led  him  to  assign  a  large  and  most 
important  province  to  experience,  and  then,  for  the  sake  of  saving 
that  province  from  the  destruction  with  which  its  extravagant  pre- 
tensions threatened  it,  to  show  what  region  lies  beyond  it,  and  by 
what  faculty  that  region  is  cognizable.  But  those  who  are  least 
competent  to  judge  of  these  merits  must  yet  perceive  that  this 
doctrine  has  been  subject  to  the  most  pelting  storm  of  ridicule  and 
abuse ;  has  been  resisted  not  only  by  the  most  accomplished  intel- 
lects in  Europe,  but  (which  is  more  important) — by  all  the  habits 
of  thought  which  had  rooted  themselves  in  the  minds  of  ordinary 
men  ;  has  had  as  many  appearances  and  plausibilities  to  oppose 
it,  as  the  Copernican  doctrine,  or  any  other  that  is  most  startling, 
and  yet  has  not  merely  stood  its  ground  but  has  forced  itself  under 
one  modification  or  other  into  the  speculations  of  thoughtful  men, 
and  is  moulding  the  language  and  opinions  of  those  who  have  the 


164 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


least  comprehension  of  its  meaning,  or  are  most  disinclined  to 
acknowledge  its  truth. 

How  important  this  fact  is,  in  a  theological  point  of  view, 
may  be  judged  from  one  circumstance.  English  writers  con- 
tinually use  the  word  rationalism  as  if  it  designated*  one  set  of 
opinions  or  one  mode  of  thought.  But  there  is  the  widest  difference 
between  the  rationalism  of  the  last  century  and  the  rationalism  of  this 
— between  that  which  grew  up  under  the  patronage  of  Locke,  and 
that  which  is  derived  from  the  influence  of  Kant.  The  former, 
whether  assuming  the  mild,  modified,  and  feeble  shape  which  it 
received  from  our  critics  in  the  last  century,  or  the  destructive 
character  which  terrifies  us  in  some  of  the  (now  obsolete)  German 
neologians,  is  merely  the  fruit  of  a  desire  to  be  rid  of  facts  which 
are  at  variance  with  the  ordinary  notions  and  experience  of  man- 
kind ;  and  to  make  revelation  the  announcement  of  certain  moral 
notions  and  axioms  which  men  by  their  constitution  must  derive 
from  without ;  the  latter  leads  to  the  underrating  of  facts  because 
they  belong  merely  to  the  region  of  experience,  and  to  the  notion 
that  naked  principles,  which  alone  are  of  paramount  importance, 
and  with  which  alone  the  reason  is  conversant,  are  not  imparted  to 
it,  but  contained  in  it.  From  this  statement  it  is  evident  that  the 
results  of  the  two  systems  may  often  coincide ;  but  the  habits  of 
thought  which  have  engendered  them  are  so  adverse,  that  a  person 
wrho  takes  one  for  the  other,  is  likely  to  misunderstand  the  pro- 
cesses of  his  neighbour's  mind,  if  not  of  his  own. 

It  may  be  said,  "  But  surely  the  difference,  be  it  great  or  small, 
is  in  favour  of  the  older  opinion,  and  not  of  the  more  recent  one. 
That  assumed  the  existence  and  the  necessity  of  a  revelation,  only 
confining  its  use  within  very  narrow  limits ;  this  dispenses  with  a 
revelation,  perhaps  denies  the  possibility  of  it  altogether;"  I  am 
not  anxious  to  disprove  this  statement.  I  may  feel  the  force  of  it 
as  strongly  as  those  who  are  most  inclined  to  put  it  forward  in  the 
shape  either  of  denunciation  or  of  warning.  But  before  I  can  at- 
tach any  great  value  to  it  in  one  form  or  the  other,  I  must  be  sure 
that  it  is  not  disturbing  the  faith  of  those  whom  it  condemns  or 
counsels  in  a  truth;  that  this  truth  is  not  one  which  God  would 
have  us  of  this  age  especially  receive  and  hold  fast ;  that  it  is  not 
one  which  when  thoroughly  understood  and  heartily  embraced  may 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS.  165 

contribute  much  to  the  recovery  of  those  principles  and  the  assertion 
of  ihose  facts  which  it  seems  to  set  at  naught. 

I  would  ask  any  one  to  reflect  calmly  upon  the  circumstances 
of  the  country  in  which  this  philosophical  revolution  has  taken 
place.  In  that  country  Luther  had  asserted  the  doctrine,  that  there 
were  certain  truths  which  were  so  necessary  to  the  life  and  being 
of  man  that  the  simple  proclamation  of  them — "  the  foolishness  of 
preaching" — would  carry  home  the  conviction  of  them  to  innumer- 
able hearts.  They  were  proclaimed  in  the  words  of  a  book,  be- 
cause that  book  contained  the  simplest,  most  genuine,  most  vital 
exhibition  of  them.  This  was  the  first  act  of  the  Reformation. 
The  curtain  rises  in  the  second,  and  exhibits  to  us  the  disciples  of 
Luther  poring  over  the  words  of  this  book,  in  the  hope,  often  a 
most  vain  hope,  of  extracting  some  meaning  from  them ;  then 
fighting  with  one  another  in  defence  of  the  fragment  of  meaning 

DO  O  D 

which  they  had  discovered  in  it.  Then  we  see  another  generation 
engaged  in  quite  a  different  occupation,  that  of  tearing  page  after 
page  out  of  this  book  because  it  speaks  of  unintelligible  matters 
with  which  reasonable  men  have  no  concern  ;  but  yet  maintaining 
the  wisdom  and  propriety  of  certain  parts  of  it  which  were  con- 
sistent with  the  general  verdict  of  nature  and  experience.  Then  a 
a  man  arises  who  asks  what  this  general  verdict  is  ?  He  takes 
to  pieces  all  the  demonstrations  by  which  men  had  fancied  that 
they  could  make  out  to  themselves  the  importance  of  morality, 
the  immortality  of  the  soul,  the  being  of  a  God.  He  says,  "  All 
these  are  good  for  nothing ;  they  establish  no  conclusion  ;  it  is  as- 
sumed in  the  premises."  But  he  says  at  the  same  time,  "  This  is 
no  reason  for  doubting  or  disbelieving  these  truths  ;  if  they  be 
fundamental  truths,  they  must  be  the  premises  of  every  demonstra- 
tion, not  the  results  of  it;  you  cannot  have  a  greater  witness  for 
these  great  elements  of  human  faith  than  this,  that  every  thing 
seems  to  prove  them,  because  in  fact  nothing  can  be  proved  with- 
out them.  And  then  this  argument  ab  extra  is  clenched  and 
established  by  a  corresponding  one  from  within.  "  You  say  that 
this  cannot  be,  because  there  is  no  faculty  which  takes  cognizance 
of  such  primary  truths  as  these.  I  say  there  is  and  must  be  such 
a  faculty,  otherwise  the  existence  of  a  mathematical  science — the 
existence  of  that  science  upon  which  the  demonstration  of  physi- 


166 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


cal  facts  rests — would  be  just  as  impossible  as  the  existence  of  a 
moral  science.  I  say  further,  that  this  faculty  is  not  merely  one 
of  the  faculties  of  humanity,  but  that  it  is  precisely  the  human 
faculty ;  that  which  does  not  belong  to  an  individual  as  such,  but 
which  belongs  to  each  man  as  a  man,  as  the  member  of  a  race;  the 
faculty  which  is  conversant  with  that  which  is  universal  as  well  as 
with  that  which  is  necessary." 

Such  language  as  this,  so  far  as  it  is  understood  and  believed, 
must,  of  course,  displace  a  whole  host  of  notions  and  conclusions 
which  had  previously  been  looked  upon  as  sacred,  not  because 
they  were  old  but  because  they  were  new — because  they  seemed 
to  have  been  the  last  and  most  perfect  effort  of  the  human  intellect 
in  repealing  and  annulling*  the  decrees  of  former  times.  The  doc- 
trine would  therefore  assume  something  of  a  destructive  character 
— not  that  it  really  had  that  character,  even  in  reference  to  the 
maxims  of  the  school  of  experience  so  far  as  they  were  positive ; 
for  it  distinctly  ratified  the  doctrine  of  Locke,  that  all  notions  and 
conceptions  are  the  results  of  sensible  experience,  and  that  the  im- 
pressions of  sense  precede  in  order  of  time  all  generalizations  (such 
as  that  the  whole  is  greater  than  its  part) ;  it  merely  affirmed  the 
existence  of  principles,  at  whatever  time  they  may  be  discovered 
to  the  mind,  which  are  presumed  in  the  existence  of  the  mind  it- 
self, and  without  which  it  could  form  no  notions,  conceptions,  or 
generalizations,  nay,  could  receive  no  impressions.  Still  the  effect 
upon  the  persons  who  adopted  the  system  was  not  altered  by  this 
circumstance ;  they  felt  that  they  had  found  out  something  which 
set  aside  the  most  favourite  theories  of  their  immediate  predecessors. 
And  if  it  had  set  aside  their  theories,  had  it  not  even  in  a  more 
complete  way  set  aside  those  of  the  thinkers  who  had  preceded 
them,  and  over  whom  they  had  prevailed  ?  Had  it  not  proved 
that  to  be  involved  in  the  very  constitution  of  man,  which  had 
been  supposed  to  be  merely  delivered  to  him,  and  delivered  to  him 
moreover  as  if  it  were  essentially  at  variance  with  his  constitution, 
as  if  he  could  not  receive  it  except  by  miracle  ?  To  be  sure  the 
school  of  the  Encyclopedists  had  talked  nonsense  when  they  at- 
tempted to  say  what  Reason  was,  and  when  they  affirmed  that 
what  they  called  Reason  was  the  judge  of  what  is  true  ;  but  they 
were  right  in  saying  that  reason  is  the  judge  of  what  is  truth ;  nay, 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


167 


that  truth  and  reason  cannot  have  any  existence  apart  from  each 
other. 

I  would  entreat  a  patient  consideration  for  the  previous  difficul- 
ties of  the  persons  who  adopted  this  language,  for  the  temper  of 
mind  which  they  inherited  even  when  they  fancied  that  they  had 
thrown  it  off,  for  all  the  temptations  to  pride  and  self-exaltation 
which  arise  from  the  sense  of  a  new  discovery — I  would  entreat  a 
consideration  of  all  these  circumstances  before  such  phrases  as  these 
are  immediately  supposed  to  mean  all  the  mischief  which  I  am 
quite  ready  to  acknowledge  is  lurking  in  them.  But  above  all  I 
would  entreat  my  reader  to  reflect  upon  the  fact,  which  I  have  been 
forced  to  present  to  him  under  several  other  forms  already,  that 
while  the  Protestant  system  encourages  all  possible  demands  on  the 
part  of  the  human  mind  for  satisfaction,  it  provides  nothing  to  satis- 
fy the  demand  for  some  truths  or  principles  which  shall  belong  to 
us,  not  as  individuals,  but  as  members  of  a  race.  Protestants  say 
that  every  truth  is  to  be  realized  by  each  man  for  himself,  and  that 
when  a  certain  number  of  individuals  have  been  made  conscious  of 
the  same  truth,  they  are  to  meet  together  and  have  fellowship  in 
the  profession  of  it ;  they  have  never  effectually  taught  men  that 
there  are  truths  appertaining  to  them  as  men,  which  do  not  depend 
for  their  reality  upon  our  consciousness  of  them,  but  are  the  grounds 
on  which  that  consciousness  must  rest.  The  doctrines  of  Protestant- 
ism do,  as  1  believe,  necessarily  imply  this,  but  they  do  not  distinct- 
ly affirm  it ;  they  refer  distinctly  and  formally  to  men  as  individuals- 
The  systems  of  Protestantism  not  only  do  not  affirm  it,  but  in  the 
most  practical  manner  deny  it. 

I  think  then  that  this  metaphysical  revolution  points  the  same 
way  as  those  other  changes  in  men's  feelings  which  I  have  noted 
already,  namely,  to  the  demand  for  something  Catholic,  and  for 
that,  not  as  an  accident  and  addition  to  the  faith  which  we  hold  as 
individuals,  but  as  the  very  groundwork  of  it.  And  if  I  am  asked 
to  explain  how  I  suppose  it  is  possible  that  a  doctrine,  which  seems 
to  set  all  revelation  and  all  tradition  aside,  and  to  claim  a  more  di- 
rect independence  for  the  human  reason  than  any  other  has  ever 
done,  may  yet  be  leading,  through  God's  gracious  guidance  and 
providence,  to  the  assertion  and  confirmation  of  those  principles 
which  Christians  refer  to  revelation  or  tradition,  and  which  are  said, 


168 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


and  I  think  rightly  said,  to  humble  the  reason  of  man — I  believe 
the  kind  of  conflicts  which  have  been  excited  among  philosophical 
men  by  the  promulgation  of  Kant's  doctrine  are  an  answer  to  the 
question. 

Almost  from  the  time  that  its  meaning  began  to  be  earnestly 
canvassed,  three  great  difficulties,  or  at  least  blanks,  were  discover- 
ed in  it.  One  set  of  persons  complained,  that  it  was  a  hard,  dry 
doctrine,  with  which  a  man  who  had  a  heart  could  have  no  sym- 
pathy. It  supposed  the  highest  of  all  affirmations  to  be — God  is, 
immortality  is,  freedom  is.  These  great  primary  truths  of  the  rea- 
son lay  there  without  any  power  of  addressing  themselves  to  or 
connecting  themselves  with  any  one  form  or  feeling — the  Hercules 
pillars  of  the  intellect,  or  the  premises  of  a  demonstration — nothing 
more.  This  was  one  objection  which  may  probably  have  led  to 
that  division  between  the  objects  of  philosophy  and  religion  which 
I  noticed  in  the  last  section,  and  to  the  assigning  to  the  latter  what- 
ever concerns  our  human  feelings  and  sympathies.  Others,  to  whom 
this  distinction  seemed  artificial  and  impracticable,  laboured  to  con- 
struct a  philosophy  which  should  possess  the  warmth  and  cheerful- 
ness of  a  religion. 

Next  comes  the  feeling,  which  in  a  Protestant  country  could  not 
but  force  itself  upon  a  number  of  minds.  The  reason  speaks  of  all 
these  great  and  eternal  verities ;  but  what  have  I  to  do  with  them  1 
What  link  is  there  between  my  personal  consciousness  and  these 
grand  and  universal  affirmations  ?  Tell  us  this,  or  your  scheme, 
be  it  as  strongly  fenced  with  demonstration  as  it  may,  cannot  con- 
tent a  man. 

But,  lastly,  there  seemed  to  be  a  fatal  contradiction,  if  not  in 
the  principle  itself,  yet  between  the  principle  and  the  inferences 
which  were  instantly  deduced  from  it.  There  is  an  organ  in  man 
which  speaks  of  that  which  is  absolute  and  eternal.  You  believe 
that  this  organ,  call  it  reason  or  what  you  will,  is  distinct  from  the 
one  that  merely  forms  notions  and  affirms  propositions.  But  how 
distinct?  If  it  merely  affirm, "  There  is  something  absolute  ;  there 
is  something  eternal;"  these  are  propositions.  To  suppose  this 
then,  is  to  destroy  your  own  doctrine.  But  if  this  be  not  the  wit- 
ness of  the  reason  concerning  that  which  is  absolute,  what  must  it 
be  ?    It  must  affirm  the  existence  of  that  which  is  absolute,  not  as 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


169 


the  intellect  affirms  a  proposition,  but  as  the  eye  affirms  an  object. 
As  an  object,  it  must  be  something  distinct  from  that  which  beholds 
it,  anterior  to  it,  that  without  which  it  could  not  be.  Suppose  the 
Universe  be  the  great,  eternal,  absolute  thing  which  we  feel  must 
be — well,  then,  this  Universe  spake  to  us  first ;  we  did  not  form  it* 
did  not  even  discover  it ;  it  revealed  itself  to  us.  But  it  is  the  eye 
or  the  imagination  which  demands  an  external  universe;  the  Rea- 
son must  demand  something  different  from  that.  Does  it  not,  ac- 
cording to  your  own  showing,  demand  that  which  is  homogeneous 
to  itself?  Does  it  not  demand  an  absolute  Reason  ?  And  if  there 
be  such  an  absolute  Reason  to  which  the  reason  in  man  looks  up,  a 
real  being,  is  it  more  consistent  to  believe  the  reason  found  him  out, 
or  that  he  revealed  himself  to  the  reason  ? 

According  to  this  last  statement,  the  doctrine  that  there  are 
principles  antecedent  to  experience,  whereof  the  reason  of  man 
takes  cognizance,  supersedes  the  necessity  of  a  revelation  only  when 
it  contradicts  itself.  But  this  is  not  all — If  this  view  of  the  case  be 
the  right  one,  the  revelation  which  the  reason  demands,  cannot  be 
one  merely  of  moral  principles  or  axioms, — it  must  be  the  revelation 
of  a  living  Being.  It  cannot  therefore  be  one  in  which  events  are 
merely  accidents  that  can  be  separated  from  some  idea  which  has 
tried  to  embody  itself  in  them.  Facts  may  be  only  the  drapery  of 
doctrines ;  but  they  would  seem  to  be  the  only  possible  method  of 
manifestation  for  the  Being,  the  essential  Reason.  And  seeing  that 
by  the  hypothesis,  this  Being  of  whom  the  reason  speaks  is  one  wrho 
transcends  the  conditions  of  space  and  time;  seeing  that  this  one 
faculty  in  man  has  the  power  of  beholding  that  which  is  not  under 
these  conditions,  but  that  all  the  other  faculties  are  subject  to  them, 
it  would  be  nothing  strange  or  contradictory  if  the  facts  which  em- 
bodied the  revelation,  should  be  such  as  at  once  presented  him  to 
all  the  faculties  which  we  possess,  and  enabled  that  highest  one  to 
realize  its  own  peculiar  prerogative  of  looking  through  them.  In 
this  way  one  might  perhaps  discover  a  hope  of  reconciling  the  law 
of  the  affections  and  the  law  of  the  reason,  without  that  contrivance 
of  separating  them  under  two  departments  and  supposing  that  a 
mere  scholastic  boundary  could  keep  them  really  apart.  One  might 
dream  too,  of  a  way  by  which  the  consciousness  of  each  individual 
should  be  called  forth,  through  the  sense  of  his  relationship  to  the 


170 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


Being  who  was  revealing  himself  to  him  and  condescending  to  his 
necessities.  But  whether  this  be  the  case  or  not,  it  seems  clear 
that  this  new  form  of  rationalism  cannot  be  satisfied  with  itself ; 
that  it  will  become  irrational  if  it  cannot  find  something  to  unite 
and  combine  with  it ;  that  if  it  be  followed  out  fairly  it  involves  the 
conclusion  that  something  must  have  been  originally  given  or  im- 
parted to  the  reason ;  that  this  gift  must  be  of  some  truth  which  is 
transcendent  and  divine ;  that  it  must  proceed  from,  and  have  refer- 
ence to  a  living  being  ;  that  it  must  concern  all  men  as  men  ;  that 
the  best  test  of  its  concerning  them  and  really  being  necessary  to 
the  constitution  of  humanity  itself,  is  that  it  should  have  been  receiv- 
ed and  believed  by  men  merely  upon  the  bare  announcement  of  it, 
and  that  in  every  subsequent  stage  of  human  history  it  should  have 
been  doubted,  contradicted,  ridiculed,  and  yet  have  kept  its  ground, 
and  proved  itself,  in  the  most  advanced  period  of  civilization  as 
well  as  in  the  simplest,  to  be  that  which  men  want  as  the  sign  and 
bond  of  their  fellowship. 

4.  One  feature  more  must  be  taken  notice  of  in  the  philosophi- 
cal countenance  of  our  age,  or  we  shall  have  still  an  imperfect 
image  of  it.  The  effort  to  bring  all  systems  of  thought  into  har- 
mony, or  to  frame  a  system  to  which  each  one  shall  contribute 
certain  elements,  has  been  repeated  in  various  periods  of  the  world. 
But  unquestionably  the  inclination  for  such  experiments  was  not  so 
strong,  even  in  the  period  immediately  following  the  promulgation 
of  Christianity  as  in  our  own.  I  do  not  think  the  strength  of  this 
inclination  can  be  fully  ascertained  even  by  observing  how  many 
conspicuous  men,  and  those  of  the  nation  which  most  represents  the 
form  and  pressure  of  the  time,  have  felt  it  and  indulged  it.  Every  one 
can  perhaps  discover  its  workings  in  himself.  One  after  another 
plan  of  union  which  we  have  devised  may  have  failed  ;  some  strange, 
uncouth  performer  may  have  insisted  with  cruel  pertinacity  upon 
his  right  to  play  his  solo,  without  the  least  regard  to  the  order 
under  which  the  rest  have  been  reduced ;  or  we  may  have  found 
that  when  we  had  got  rid  of  the  discords,  the  music  became  so 
flat  and  uninteresting,  that  no  one  cared  to  listen  to  it;  but  amidst 
all  discouragements,  in  spite  of  the  just  ridicule  of  others,  or  the 
more  sad  and  painful  scorn  which  the  wearied  Irenicus  is  tempted 
to  indulge  at  his  own  expense,  the  wish  continues  unabated,  and  it 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


171 


is  sustained  by  a  secret  spring  of  hope — an  unconquerable  convic- 
tion that  the  dream  was  a  true  one,  though  it  may  seem  to  have 
met  with  the  most  palpable  practical  contradiction. 

This  temper  as  we  have  already  seen,  has  exhibited  itself  among 
religious  men — among  a  class  of  them  in  whom  it  might  least  have 
been  expected,  and  who  would  have  felt  the  strongest  abhorrence 
of  any  system  which  was  merely  compounded  of  fragments  from 
previous  speculations  and  heresies.  Nor  can  it  be  said  with  strict 
truth,  that  when  it  appears  among  the  philosophers  of  our  day,  this 
is  the  object  which  they  propose  to  themselves.  The  name  Eclec- 
ticism, which  they  willingly  adopt,  seems  to  portend  a  mere  hortus 
siccus  of  flowers  gathered  from  all  soils,  and  arranged  according  to 
the  taste  of  the  collector.  But  if  they  spoke  for  themselves,  they 
would  give  a  very  different  representation  of  their  system.  They 
would  say  that  their  will  had  nothing  to  do  with  it;  that  Eclecti- 
cism was  a  necessity  of  the  age :  that  one  partial  theory  had  suc- 
ceeded and  displaced  another  in  the  by-gone  periods — that  it  was 
no  longer  possible  to  adopt  any  of  these  as  adequate  and  self-suf- 
ficing— that  they  were  all  seeking  some  more  capacious  and  univer- 
sal scheme,  in  which  they  might  merge.  The  difference  between 
this  feeling  and  that  which  prevailed  in  the  last  century,  is  made 
the  more  striking  by  the  one  point  in  which  they  are  alike.  The 
disciples  of  Cousin  express  as  much  reverence  for  the  age  into 
which  they  are  born,  as  the  disciples  of  Voltaire  felt  for  their  own; 
but  the  earlier  school  believed  that  it  was  created  to  destroy  all 
forms  of  opinion  which  had  existed  previously;  the  later  one,  that 
it  is  meant  to  put  a  sanction  and  imprimatur  upon  all,  and  to  dis- 
cern the  principle  which  is  the  climax  of  all.  The  first  and  most  ob- 
vious effect  of  this  difference  is  an  entirely  opposite  estimation  of 
the  truth  and  uses  of  history.  By  the  French  school  of  the  last 
century  it  was  slighted  as  useless,  for  any  other  purpose  than  as  a 
record  of  absurdities  to  be  ridiculed  and  avoided  ;  by  the  French 
school  of  this  century  it  is  regarded  as  the  key  to  all  knowledge ; 
the  acts  of  past  times  are  studied,  not  merely  with  diligence,  but 
with  reverence.  Such  a  habit  of  mind  on  whatever  subject  it  is 
exercised,  must  draw  a  reward  after  it,  and  these  philosophers  have 
been  permitted  to  throw  a  most  valuable  light  upon  the  meaning 
and  succession  of  events,  especially  in  the  annals  of  modern  Europe. 


* 


172  PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

Upon  the  meaning  and  succession  of  events,  they  have  thrown 
this  light  ;  but  very  little,  I  suspect,  upon  the  feelings  or  cha- 
racter of  men.  It  is  a  complaint  which  I  believe  is  universal  among 
their  greatest  admirers,  that  they  have  no  faculty  for  understanding 
a  living  human  being  in  any  other  way  than  as  a  link  in  a  chain  of 
operations.  They  do  not  wish  to  set  aside  free  agency  ;  their  the- 
ory would  rather  dispose  them  to  give  it  great  honour,  but  they 
cannot  look  at  it  except  in  relation  to  a  theory,  which  is  nearly  the 
same  thing  as  saying  that  they  dispense  with  it  altogether.  Now 
this  will  surely  be  found  a  most  unfortunate  peculiarity  in  men  who 
hope  to  adjust  and  harmonize  the  different  thoughts  and  feelings  of 
our  time.  Putting  religious  opinions  and  habits  out  of  the  ques- 
tion— assuming  that  they  are  too  vagrant  and  fanatical  to  be  sub- 
jects for  an  eclectical  experiment — passing  over  also  all  political 
questions,  and  the  struggles  of  different  individuals  or  classes  for 
a  recognition  in  the  polity  of  a  state — we  shall  find  in  the  philoso- 
phical dispositions  of  our  days  most  awkward  and  refractory  mate- 
rials. The  strongest  of  these  dispositions,  I  observed,  was  to  ac- 
knowledge a  spirit  in  man,  and  to  regard  all  other  facts  with  which 
he  is  concerned  in  reference  to  that  one.  Then  again  we  found 
men  full  of  living  sympathies  with  nature,  and  longings  for  forms 
in  which  this  sympathy  might  be  expressed.  Now  no  theory,  let 
it  make  what  allowance  it  may  for  the  existence  of  both  these  in- 
clinations, can  really  provide  any  satisfaction  for  them.  All  its 
efforts,  therefore,  must  be  confined  to  that  region  of  thought  which 
I  have  designated  by  the  name  of  pure  metaphysics ;  to  the  adjust- 
ment, that  is,  of  the  doctrine  respecting  the  reason  and  the  truths 
antecedent  to  experience,  with  previous  speculations.  But  there 
are  difficulties  in  the  way  even  of  this  limited  application  of  Eclec- 
ticism. The  first  is,  that  the  rationalist  will  say,  "  The  work  is 
already  done;  the  critical  philosophy  is  that  which  discriminated 
between  the  provinces  of  reason  and  experience;  any  attempt  to 
eclecticise  upon  that  is  to  gild  refined  gold  or  paint  the  lily.  But 
the  other  objection  is  more  fatal.  The  reason,  it  would  seem,  from 
the  remarks  which  have  been  made  already,  speaks  of  an  actual 
being,  an  absolute  reason  ;  and  all  attempts  to  make  it  merely  ut- 
ter a  proposition  about  that  being,  tend  to  destroy  its  very  nature,  as 
that  nature  is  expounded  by  the  rationalist.   It  is  evident  then  that 


PHILOSOPHICAL  MOVEMENTS.  173 

no  scheme  of  Ontology,  be  it  as  complete  as  it  may,  can  dispense 
with  or  include  the  truth  which  he  proclaims.  It  may  be  a  sound 
theory,  a  valuable  theory,  but  it  will  be  a  theory  concerning  some- 
thing, and  of  that  something  itself  he  is  endeavouring  to  bear 
witness. 

Nevertheless,  all  these  arguments  will  never  persuade  men  in 
our  day  that  reconciliation  of  some  kind  is  not  possible,  and  must 
not  eventually  take  place,  between  warring  opinions  and  feelings. 
All  kinds  of  endeavours  at  the  compromise  and  suppression  of  truth 
— endeavours  which  succeed  just  as  long  as  men  feel  nothing,  and 
care  for  nothing,  and  are  laughed  to  scorn  the  moment  any  ener- 
getic man  arises,  or  any  energetic  thought  is  awakened — endeav- 
ours which  (however  strange  the  assertion  may  sound)  are,  on  the 
whole,  more  hopeless  in  our  day  than  in  any  previous  one, — will 
be  suggested  and  made  by  individuals  and  by  governments,  with  a 
desperate  conviction,  that  one  at  last  must  be  meant  to  prosper, 
and  with  infinite  rage  and  astonishment  that  the  one  proposed  does 
not  fare  better  than  its  ten  thousand  predecessors.  Undoubtedly 
too  there  is  great  need  that  the  philosophical  feelings  which  I  have 
spoken  of  as  all  belonging  to  this  time  should  find  some  meeting 
point,  for  though  all  equally  strong  and  apparently  proceeding  from 
the  same  source,  they  oftentimes  clash  strangely  with  each  other. 
The  assertor  of  man's  spiritual  powers  exalts  the  hero  who  main- 
tains a  battle  with  circumstances  and  triumphs  over  them  ;  the  ar- 
tistical  philosopher  delights  in  him  whoc  an  adapt  himself  to  circum- 
stances. If  they  maintain  any  fellowship  with  each  other,  it  is  a 
fellowship  founded  upon  the  pleasure  which  the  one  takes  in  no- 
ticing a  curious,  and  to  him  a  puzzling  specimen  of  human  nature, 
and  upon  the  awe  which  the  other  entertains  of  a  person  who  has 
realized  a  state  which  he  knows  that  he  can  never  reach,  and  with 
which  he  half  confesses  to  himself  that  he  has  no  sympathy. 
Again,  both  agree  in  dislike  to  the  metaphysician,  one  because  he 
seems  to  bind  down  the  energy  and  freedom  of  man  by  fixed  and 
absolute  laws;  the  other  because  he  sets  up  a  dry  truth  against  all 
forms  and  images.  It  would  seem  that  if  all  these  tendencies  be 
sound  and  true,  as  I  have  maintained  that  they  are,  there  ought  to 
be  some  method  of  bringing  them  into  harmony,  which  should  pre- 
serve each  of  them  in  its  strength ;  which  should  not  merely  account 


174 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


for  them,  but  embody  them,  and  enable  them  to  produce  some  real 
fruit.  But  then  would  it  not  seem  at  least  possible  that  if  reason 
affirm  a  truth  which  must  have  always  been ;  if  the  communion 
writh  nature  be  something  implied  in  our  constitution,  and  therefore 
implied  in  the  constitutions  of  those  who  lived  a  thousand  years 
ago;  if  humanity  be  essentially  spiritual,  the  reconciling  method 
may  already  exist,  and  that  the  work  of  our  age  may  be  not  to 
create  it  afresh,  but  to  discover  its  meaning  and  realize  its  necessity  1 


section  nr. 

POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

American   Revolution — French    Revolution — Individual    Rights — Individual   Will — 
Schemes  of  Universal  Society — Education — Power  of  the  State. 

I  have  had  occasion  to  speak  of  the  theological  temper  of  the 
United  States  of  North  America,  as  illustrating  one  stage  in  the 
history  of  Protestantism,  and  as  indicating  a  desire  for  something 
that  Protestantism  does  not  supply.  But  the  political  change  which 
took  place  in  these  states,  when  they  revolted  from  the  mother 
country,  is,  in  the  same  point  of  view,  even  more  important. 

Among  the  leading  characteristics  of  the  Reformation,  I  noticed 
an  anxiety  to  assert  the  rights  of  national  Sovereigns,  and,  as  in- 
volved in  them,  the  distinct  position  of  each  nation.  This  feeling, 
I  said,  was  closely  intertwined  with  that  feeling  of  personal  distinct- 
ness in  each  man  which  is  the  main  spring  of  Protestantism.  But 
when  the  Protestant  systems  had  developed  themselves,  these  insep- 
arable twins  began  to  manifest  great  impatience  of  each  other's 
company.  The  monarchs  of  the  reformed  states  found  that  the 
belief  in  each  individual's  right  to  act  and  think  for  himself  trench- 
ed very  inconveniently  upon  their  authority,  and  tended  in  no  de- 
gree to  the  consistency  and  unity  of  the  nations  which  they  gov- 
erned. They  observed  that  whenever  the  religious  feeling  was 
strong,  it  treated  all  things  as  subordinate  to  itself ;  therefore,  unless 
it  could  be  made  to  conspire  with  the  objects  of  their  government, 
it  must  thwart  them.  There  seemed  to  be  but  two  expedients;  to 
orce  the  religious  feeling  into  this  agreement,  or  as  much  as  possi- 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


175 


ble  to  weaken  it.  The  first  policy  was  tried,  and  failed ;  afterwards 
the  latter  was  adopted  for  a  time  with  better  success.  The  dispo- 
sitions on  the  other  side  of  course  corresponded  to  these.  The  re- 
ligious bodies  became  more  and  more  jealous  of  the  sovereign's 
interference  with  them  ;  in  times  of  strong  excitement  they  resisted 
it ;  but  as  such  times  made  their  terms  of  communion  more  strict, 
these  bodies  became  less  and  less  identical  with  the  nation ;  there- 
fore it  was  not  difficult  to  believe,  when  peace  returned,  that  they 
had  nothing  to  do  with  national  affairs,  that  it  was  their  business  to 
be  wholly  religious,  and  the  business  of  the  monarchs  to  be  wholly 
secular.  This  opinion,  however,  was  very  slowly  adopted  by  any 
class  of  Reformers.  The  Lutherans  thought,  and  still  think,  a  State 
tyranny  less  intolerable  than  the  abandonment  of  the  Reformation 
principle.  The  Calvinists,  in  their  palmy  days,  resolved,  that  if  the 
state  could  not  be  religious  with  a  sovereign,  it  should  be  religious 
without  one.  The  Scotch  Covenant  affirmed  the  state  to  be  essen- 
tially theocratic ;  the  whole  effort  of  our  civil  wars  was  to  establish 
the  same  principle,  and  in  one  strange  interlude  between  the  acts 
of  that  tragedy,  the  Scotch  tried  to  create  a  Presbyterian  theocracy 
in  the  person  of  Charles  the  Second.  It  was  only  upon  the  disap- 
pointment of  these  schemes,  that  the  modern  doctrine  under  its  dif- 
ferent modifications  began  to  prevail.  And  in  the  mean  time  an 
experiment  was  to  be  made  whether  religious  men,  if  they  could 
not  exercise  an  influence  over  the  old  societies  of  Europe,  might 
not  frame  societies  for  themselves  in  another  world. 

The  legislation  and  government  of  the  Puritan  colonies  bore 
every  mark  of  their  origin.  They  were,  in  fact,  if  the  solecism 
maybe  pardoned, sect-commonwealths,  connected  by  their  religious 
peculiarities  more  than  by  the  bonds  of  a  common  language,  of  a 
common  origin  or  of  subjection  to  a  distant  sovereign.  Before  the 
time  arrived  when  the  last  mentioned  of  these  ties  was  to  be  snapt 
asunder,  the  colonies  had  acquired  an  important  position  as  trading 
communities.  The  religious  feeling  of  the  early  settlers  had  lost 
much  of  its  strength,  but  had  left  behind  it  industrious  habits,  clear- 
ness of  understanding  in  common  matters,  indifference  to  refine- 
ments either  physical  or  intellectual,  and  a  useful  pertinacity  of  cha- 
racter. Of  such  elements  the  heroes  of  the  revolution  were  com- 
posed, men  who,  being  exceedingly  like  the  Puritans  in  these  qual- 


176 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


ities,  differed  from  them  in  this,  that  their  notions  of  government 
and  society  were  unconnected  with  a  spiritual  principle,  and  refer- 
red wholly  to  the  condition  and  circumstances  of  this  world.  This 
change  was  evident  from  the  declaration  of  Independence — a  docu- 
ment in  which  the  old  Protestant  feeling,  that  each  man  is  a  distinct 
being  possessing  distinct  privileges  and  rights,  is  curiously  blended 
with  a  vague  notion  of  a  general  fellowship,  which  was  beginning 
to  gain  currency  in  Europe,  and  which  was  rather  a  reaction  against 
Protestantism  than  the  natural  result  of  it.  And  of  this  declara- 
tion the  ultimate  consequence  was,  that  union  of  the  different  inde- 
pendent states,  respecting  which  future  history  will  determine 
whether  it  have  taken  effect  by  a  process  of  natural  fusion,  or 
merely  by  the  decrees  and  contrivances  of  legislators. 

These  events  were  undoubtedly  indications  that  a  strife  of  prin- 
ciples was  at  hand,  though  the  scene  of  it  was  not  to  be  laid  in  the 
and  of  Franklin  and  Washington.  It  was  in  a  country  of  the  old 
world,  a  country  in  which  the  Protestant  doctrine  had  been  stifled 
two  centuries  before,  a  country  in  which  society  had  been  every 
thing  and  human  beings  almost  nothing,  that  the  most  vehement 
declaration  of  men's  individual  rights  was  to  be  made,  and  that  the 
death  struggle  between  those  impulses  which  lead  each  person  to 
maintain  such  rights,  and  those  which  lead  him  to  seek  communion 
with  his  fellows  was  to  begin. 

It  has  been  truly  and  profoundly  observed,  that  the  French  Revo- 
lution could  not  have  been  brought  about  merely  by  the  skepticism 
of  the  philosophers,  merely  by  the  sins  of  the  civil  and  ecclesiastical 
rulers,  merely  by  the  starvation  of  the  people,  nor  by  all  these 
combined,  if  there  had  not  been  a  certain  element  of  faith  to  mix 
with  and  contradict  the  skepticism — to  create  a  kind  of  moral  indig- 
nation against  the  sin — and  to  convert  the  sense  of  hunger  from  a 
dead  anguish  into  a  living  passion. 

The  Parisian  philosophy  of  the  eighteenth  century  was  little 
more  than  the  expression  by  men  cleverer  and  bolder  than  their 
contemporaries,  of  that  feeling  which  pervaded  the  whole  of  society. 
All  the  teachers  did  was  to  make  their  disciples  conscious  of  the 
unbelief  which  already  had  possession  of  them  ;  their  wit  was  irre- 
sistible, because  it  brought  to  light  contradictions  which  existed  in 
the  persons  they  were  addressing.    So  long  as  such  contradictions 


POL. TIC AL  MOVEMENTS.  177 

are  painful,  so  long  as  the  conscience  is  at  all  awake  to  say, "  This 
which  you  are  not  you  are  meant  to  be" — wit  of  this  kind  is  most 
torturing.  The  mind  may  feel  a  kind  of  awful  delight  in  it,  as  in 
a  just  penance  which  it  deserves  to  undergo,  but  no  grave  admoni- 
tion is  half  so  bitter.  But  when  the  conscience  is  not  awake  at  all, 
or  is  only  so  far  awake  as  to  perceive  that  hypocrisy  is  an  evil  and 
dishonourable  thing,  this  wit  will  be  very  differently  received.  The 
mere  time  killer — the  lounger  of  the  upper  classes — who  is  con- 
vinced that  every  thing  must  go  on  as  it  has  always  gone  on,  that 
words  can  do  no  harm,  and  that  his  position  in  society  gives  him  a 
title  to  see  further  than  a  clown  or  a  shopkeeper,  listens  gladly,  and 
entertains  a  doctrine  which  both  is  so  consistent  with  his  practice, 
and  which  enables  him  to  cast  away  as  absurd  any  lingering  sense 
of  responsibility.  The  active,  intelligent,  aspiring  member  of  the 
middle  class,  who  thinks  that  he  is  unfairly  depressed,  who  sees 
that  the  habits  of  society  are  false,  who  knows  that  it  derives  a 
support  from  certain  feelings  of  reverence  and  awe  which  are  con- 
nected with  the  acknowledgment  of  invisible  principles,  eagerly 
welcomes  the  discovery  that  no  such  principles  exist ;  for  then  a 
system  which,  at  least  in  all  its  outward  appearances,  is  hollow  and 
deceitful,  and  which  certainly  is  a  hinderance  to  his  ambition,  may 
gradually  fall  to  pieces.  But  though  this  philosophy  had,  for  these 
opposite  reasons,  a  hold  both  upon  the  soirees  of  Paris,  and  upon 
the  enterprising  lawyer  of  the  provincial  town,  there  was  nothing 
in  it  which  could  possibly  appeal  to  the  sympathies  of  poor  men — 
of  those  who  were  actually  suffering.  It  is  true  that  many  of  the 
philosophers  were  economists,  and  could  descant  upon  the  circum- 
stances which  made  bread  dear,  and  might  make  industry  more 
profitable ;  but  hungry  men,  hating  all  abstractions,  hate  those 
most  which  refer  to  their  hunger,  and  do  not  relieve  it.  Again,  in 
many  districts,  the  doctrines  which  the  wise  men  derided,  even  if 
we  may  not  believe  that  they  commended  themselves  as  realities  to 
those  who  had  no  home  or  portion  on  earth,  were  at  least  connected 
with  the  friendly  faces  of  cures  who  had  sympathized  and  suffered 
with  their  flocks,  and  with  actual  gifts  of  bread  at  the  convent  doors. 

Doubtless  such  relics  of  religious  association  and  sympathy  must 
have  been  much  more  thinly  scattered  among  the  mechanics  of  the 
capital :  the  habits  of  the  classes  above  them  will  have  descended 

12 


178 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


upon  them,  and  the  quicker  wit  of  the  citizen  will  have  more  quickly 
detected  the  falsehood  and  hypocrisy — being  much  more  glaring — 
which  he  saw  among  his  instructors.  Still,  even  to  this  class,  what 
was  there  in  the  teaching  of  such  a  man  as  Helvetius,  for  instance, 
which  could  have  given  the  least  pleasure  ?  Sir  James  Mackintosh 
speaks  of  the  Helvetian  philosophy  as  the  philosophy  of  the  pot- 
house. But  the  frequenter  of  the  pot-house  would  scarcely  have 
cared  to  be  told  that  a  man,  apart  from  the  influences  of  society, 
deprived  of  the  help  which  he  receives  from  legislators,  soirees,  and 
tailors,  is  good  for  nothing,  even  though  it  were  added,  that  legis- 
lators, soirees,  and  tailors,  through  the  influence  of  priestly  impos- 
ture, had  managed  their  affairs  badly,  that  they  needed  to  be  re- 
formed by  philosophy,  and  that  when  so  reformed  many  persons 
now  proscribed  might  be  brought  within  the  charmed  circle  of  civi- 
lization. The  poor  man  must  have  felt  that,  whatever  good 
chance  might  befall  him  hereafter,  he  was,  at  all  events  for  the  pre- 
sent, not  within  the  horizon  of  the  philosopher's  telescope. 

But  how  different  was  the  case  when  a  voice  was  heard  from 
Switzerland,  proclaiming  that  each  man  has  in  himself,  apart  from 
all  social  institutions  and  social  civilization,  rights  and  power ;  that 
he  may  claim  those  rights  and  put  this  power  forth ;  that  he  must 
do  so  if  he  would  break  the  bonds  which  legislators,  tailors,  and 
soirees  have  been  fastening  around  him,  and  if  he  would  form  a 
society  in  accordance  with  nature  and  truth.  This  was  an  appeal 
which  went  straight  to  the  hearts  of  those  who  had  nothing  that 
they  could  call  their  own  except  their  human  limbs  and  counte- 
nance, and  whatever  there  was,  known  or  unknown,  which  gave 
motion  to  their  limbs  and  life  to  their  countenance.  It  appealed  to 
the  sense  of  strength,  of  wrong,  of  suffering,  which  is  extinct  in  none ; 
it  called  that  forth  into  energy  and  action  which  the  philosophi- 
cal systematizers,  for  the  most  part,  either  denied  the  existence  of, 
or  would  have  been  willing  should  not  exist ;  it  mixed  itself  with 
all  those  notions  about  the  frauds  and  tyrannies  of  priests  and  law- 
yers which  the  unsentimental  school  had  propagated ;  it  turned  to 
its  own  use  all  the  materialist  notions  of  the  age  respecting  the 
origin  of  governments  in  compacts  and  conventions ;  finally,  it 
compelled  the  sages  to  acknowledge  that  the  government  of  reason 
must  begin  in  outbreaks  of  popular  fury,  and  to  join  with  the  people 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


179 


in  laying  the  foundation  of  society  in  a  declaration  of  individual 
rights. 

The  allies  soon  became  enemies :  it  was  found  that  the  philoso- 
phers could  do  nothing  with  their  theories ;  then  the  poorer  men 
tried  what  they  could  do  with  other  weapons.  The  lookers-on 
were  terrified ;  they  began  to  ask  themselves  whether  the  notions 
which  they  had  adopted,  as  the  highest  discoveries  of  the  enlight- 
ened intellect,  must  not  have  been  falsely  deduced.  Could  law 
and  government  have  had  their  birth  in  the  way  that  the  teachers 
of  the  eighteenth  century  supposed  ?  Must  not  they  have  had  some 
higher  source?  Was  it  not  necessary  to  believe  that  some  myste- 
rious power  upheld  them  ?  These  thoughts  stirred  in  the  minds  of 
men,  especially  in  the  Protestant  nations,  and  prepared  them  to 
listen  to  Burke  when  he  told  them,  as  one  who  knew,  that  law 
rests  upon  deep  invisible  principles,  not  upon  philosophical  maxims 
or  generalizations;  that  it  is  to  be  feared  and  reverenced  as  some- 
thing above  us,  not  to  be  dealt  with  as  our  creature  and  servant ; 
that  if  its  existence  and  awful  derivation  be  trifled  with  or  denied, 
it  will  prove  its  power  and  have  its  revenge.  This  teaching,  so 
unlike  any  to  which  the  last  age  had  been  accustomed,  was  received 
by  many  wondering  nobles  and  ecclesiastics  as  if  it  were  the  reve- 
lation of  a  new  truth,  especially  given  for  the  defence  of  their 
houses  and  lands ; — by  others  it  was  welcomed  with  a  more  genial 
and  thankful  feeling,  as  the  application  to  new  circumstances  of  a 
doctrine  which  had  been  familiar  to  all  great  thinkers,  and  which 
had  been  delivered  with  peculiar  power  and  solemnity  by  the  noblest 
writers  of  the  English  nation.  How  much  Burke,  an  adventurer, 
an  Irishman,  a  philosopher,  was  the  instrument  of  restoring  the 
tone  of  English  feeling,  both  amongst  the  men  of  action  and  of 
meditation,  both  in  the  upper  and  middling  class,  many  are  now 
ready  to  confess.  Nor  was  his  influence  confined  to  this  country. 
The  deep  historical  researches  of  Niebuhr  and  the  jurisprudential 
wisdom  of  Savigny,  if  they  were  not  called  forth  by  his  writings, 
at  least  received  their  direction,  in  a  great  measure,  from  him — they 
would  not  have  found  readers  to  understand  or  appreciate  them,  if 
the  soil  had  not  been  first  prepared  by  our  statesman  and  orator. 

The  French  revolution  then  has  led  many  thoughtful  persons, 
and  many  who  are  not  thoughtful,  to  the  conviction,  that  the  doc- 


180 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


trine  upon  which  the  declaration  of  rights  rests  is  essentially  false  ; 
that  a  man  choosing  to  stand  upon  his  independence — choosing  to 
be  an  individual — choosing  the  state  of  nature — can  have  no  claims 
on  his  neighbour ;  that  to  build  up  a  fellowship  upon  this  principle 
of  independence  is  a  monstrous  contradiction,  which  proves  itself 
to  be  so  the  moment  it  is  brought  to  a  practical  experiment; 
finally,  that  law,  being  the  appointed  corrector  of  and  judge  of 
man,  must  be  derived  from,  and  rest  upon,  sanctions  which  men 
regard  as  superhuman.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  there  are  not  a 
few  who,  without  directly  opposing  these  doctrines,  nay,  perhaps 
assenting  to  them  in  so  far  forth  as  they  are  answers  to  Rousseau, 
are  inclined  to  draw  inferences  from  the  same  facts  which  are 
most  unlike  these — one  might  fancy  almost  incompatible  with 
them.  "  Whatever  may  be  talked  about  the  majesty  and  tran- 
scendent character  of  law,"  say  these  persons,  "  it  is  manifest  that 
men  did  set  themselves  above  law  during  the  Revolution,  and  did 
show  that  they  could  defy  it.  The  popular  will  proved  that  all  the 
terrors  of  law,  affirmed  and  made  more  fearful  by  religion,  were 
not  sufficient  to  bind  it;  and  when  at  last  it  succumbed,  it  was  not 
to  this  powrer,  but  to  the  will  of  a  man,  who  showed  that  there 
was  that  in  him  wThich  all  the  units  of  the  nation  together  could 
not  resist.  Afterwards,  it  is  true,  the  political  machine  seemed  to 
run  into  its  old  ruts;  tradition  and  custom  apparently  resumed 
their  sway.  But  again  the  same  truth  was  established  ;  all  such 
influences  have  been  found  ineffectual ;  a  will,  a  despotical  will,  is 
wanted  somewhere ;  to  this  alone  will  men  really  bow  down. 
Whether  there  be  a  right  in  individual  men  or  not,  there  is — (I 
borrow  the  favourite  phrase  of  a  writer  who  has  exhibited  this 
position  with  the  greatest  clearness,  and  who  has  converted  the 
whole  history  of  the  Revolution  from  an  abstraction  into  a  living 
reality,) — '  a  might,'  and  this  might  will  make  itself  felt,  either  in 
a  whole  nation,  or  in  some  single  person  who  compels  the  whole 
nation  to  acknowledge  that  he  is  meant  to  govern  it." 

One  might  fancy,  when  the  opinion  is  put  into  this  form,  that 
Hobbes  was  again  speaking  in  the  nineteenth  century.  But  what- 
ever resemblance  there  may  be  in  the  words,  the  feeling  which 
finds  utterance  in  them  is  the  most  opposite  possible  to  that  of  the 
hard  materialist ;  it  is  a  feeling  of  reverence  for  spiritual  force. 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


181 


The  triumphant  despot  is  not  the  man  to  whom  men  submit,  be- 
cause they  find  it  more  convenient  to  abstain  from  fighting,  or 
because  they  find  the  government  of  one  less  perplexing  than  that 
of  many ;  no,  he  is  the  man  to  whom  they  do  homage,  because  he 
has  the  highest  title,  the  most  perfect  ordination,  because  he  was 
in  truth  created  to  be  their  king.  And  therefore  this  is  only  an- 
other, and  I  fancy  a  more  advanced  and  reasonable,  form  of  that 
reverence  for  will,  as  superior  to  the  forms  of  government  and 
society,  which  has  led  many  to  look  upon  the  notions  of  rule  and 
subjection  as  hateful  inventions  of  priests  and  monarchs.  The 
writer  of  "  Prometheus  Unbound,"  and  the  "  Revolt  of  Islam," 
preached  the  freedom  of  man  from  all  outward  forms  and  restraints : 
those  who  say  that  subjection  is  a  necessity  of  man's  being,  that  he 
longs  to  be  governed,  are  yet  equally  certain  that  he  can  only  sub- 
rait  to  the  dominion  of  a  man ;  that  he  can  never  bow  to  the 
authority  of  an  outward  rule.  And  both  alike  differ  from  the  senti- 
mental teachers  of  the  last  age,  who  exhorted  men  to  follow  their 
natures — to  give  their  good  feelings  and  impulses  fair  play,  &c. 
Both  acknowledge  that  a  man  must  not  yield  to  inclination,  that  he 
must  win  a  victory  over  his  nature — that  otherwise  he  can  neither 
be  free  himself,  nor  obtain  lordship  over  his  fellows. 

Meantime  these  notions,  which  in  this  form  might  be  passed 
by  as  the  dreams  of  idle  men,  are  forcing  themselves  in  another 
form  upon  the  reflection  of  all  practical  politicians.  Not  only  in 
quiet  chambers,  but  by  fierce  mobs,  is  the  doctrine  proclaimed  that 
Will  is  superior  to  Law — that  it  ought  to  be  superior — that  to  it 
belongs  the  power  of  unmaking  and  re-making  that  which  pre- 
tends to  hold  it  down.  Any  one  who  attends  carefully  to  the 
phrases  which  are  current  among  us  now,  will  perceive,  I  think, 
that  they  are  very  far  more  tremendous  than  those  which  were 
heard  at  the  beginning  of  the  French  Revolution.  "  We  have  a 
right,"  is  a  phrase  which  betokens  the  acknowledgment  of  some 
antecedent  principle  ;  but  in  our  day  this  language,  if  we  chance 
to  hear  it,  translates  itself  immediately  into  "  Wte  will."  This 
is  the  ground  of  the  right ;  it  aspires  to  be  the  ground  of  all 
things. 

"  And  why  has  it  not  yet  attained  its  aspiration,  and  what  can 
hinder  it  from  doing  so  ?"  asks  the  terrified  statesman.    He  finds 


182 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS,. 


that  when  such  a  question  is  started,  politics  must  have  become  an 
awful  science  ;  a  science  which  can  scarcely  be  pursued  success- 
fully by  one  who  determines  that  he  will  confine  himself  to  official 
rules  or  precedents,  and  that  he  will  admit  nothing  as  concerning 
him  which  involves  transcendent  considerations.    However  he 
may  be  inclined  to  laugh  at  metaphysics  and  scorn  theology,  he 
finds  that  he  must  discuss  a  subject*  which  touches  upon  all  the 
deepest  principles  of  both  ;  that  he  must  ascertain  by  what  means 
the  existence  of  law  may  be  reconciled  with  the  existence  of  the 
human  will.    The  debate  between  the  disciple  of  Rousseau  and 
the  disciple  of  Burke  brought  out  the  old  controversy — "  Is  the 
nature  of  man  a  good  thing, — a  thing  to  be  trusted,  as  Rousseau 
affirms  that  it  is  ?  or  is  it  an  evil  thing,  as  the  Reformers  said  it 
was,  which  is  to  be  kept  down,  and  which  every  good  man  is  to 
triumph  over  V9    And  this  controversy,  after  the  experiment  of 
the  French  Revolution,  was  decided  by  politicians  in  favour  of  the 
ancient  opinion,  and  against  the  new  one.    But  here  is  another 
old  scholastic  controversy  brought  to  the  like  practical  issue,  and 
submitted  to  the  same  adjudication  :  "  Is  Man,  as  the  successors  of 
the  Reformers  have  affirmed,  to  be  identified  with  that  nature 
which  is  attached  to  him  ;  or  is  he,  when  he  sinks  under  the  do- 
minion of  that  nature,  to  be  considered  as  abandoning  his  proper 
state,  as  subjecting  himself  to  that  over  which  he  was  meant  to 
rule  Vf  If  this  controversy  be  decided  in  favour  of  the  first  notion, 
the  notion  of  modern  Calvinism,  the  politician  must  invent  what 
charms  he  can  to  lull  that  will  to  sleep,  "  which  hath  oftentimes 
been  bound  with  fetters  and  chains,  and  the  chains  have  been  'plucked 
asunder  by  it,  and  the  fetters  broken  in  pieces,  neither  hath  any  man 
tamed  it.    But  in  the  mountains  and  the  tombs  has  it  been  continu- 
ally— crying  and  cutting  itself  with  stones."   If  on  the  other  hand 
he  admit  the  existence  of  a  will  or  spirit  in  man,  and  that  this  will 
is  only  safe  and  free  when  it  has  found  some  other  will  to  govern 
it,  and  that  in  the  vain  effort  for  independence  it  constantly  be- 
comes the  slave  of  its  own  natural  inclinations,  it  can  be  no  con- 
tradiction on  the  one  hand  to  suppose  that  law  is  meant  to  overawe 
these  inclinations ;  on  the  other  hand,  that  there  is  some  spiritual 
government,  in  which  the  man  himself  has  a  claim  of  citizenship, 
and  in  which  he  may  find  his  rightful  king. 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


183 


2.  But  this  hint  leads  us  to  another  aspect  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution, that  which  may  be  called  its  properly  political  aspect.  It 
began  with  a  declaration  of  individual  rights,  but  upon  that  declar- 
ation it  professed  to  build  a  society ;  and  this  society  was  to  be  univer- 
sal. It  is  true  that  the  character  of  the  revolutionary  proceedings, 
from  first  to  last,  was  eminently  French.  It  is  true  that  a  strong  burst 
of  French  patriotism  was  called  forth  by  the  invasion  of  the  allies, 
and  that  a  desire  of  French  predominance  may  be  traced  in  the 
different  counsels  of  the  nation,  from  the  commencement  of  the 
war  to  the  abdication  of  Napoleon.  But  the  principle  of  the  Revo- 
lution— I  mean  not  its  nominal  principles,  as  they  were  expressed 
in  parchment  documents  or  in  pompous  phrases,  but  the  real  prin- 
ciple which  governed  the  minds  of  those  who  acted  in  it,  and  which 
alone  rescued  their  documents  and  phrases  from  the  charge  of  utter 
unmeaningness — was  the  substitution  of  a  universal  polity  for 
national  polities.  Every  monstrous  absurdity  which  marked 
the  speakers,  writers,  and  actors  who  figured  in  it  savoured 
of  this  feeling,  and  proved  its  existence ;  all  its  achievements, 
both  when  it  was  acting  as  a  republic  and  was  concentrated 
in  one  man,  tended  to  this  result.  Even  the  constitutions 
which  were  propounded  one  after  another  for  France  itself, 
had  no  more  reference  to  France  than  to  Kamschatka  ;  they 
were  all  constructed  upon  universal  principles,  all  meant  for 
mankind. 

These  illustrations  of  the  worth  and  preciousness  of  particular 
governments,  when  they  are  framed  in  conformity  with  general 
maxims,  awakened  the  thoughtful  men  of  Europe  to  a  study  of 
national  history,  and  of  that  internal  life  in  nations  whereby  they 
have  been  able  to  preserve  their  identity  for  generations  amidst  all 
changes  of  external  circumstances.  And  these  profound  investi- 
gations received  light  and  strength  from  the  national  feelings  which 
the  propagandism  of  France  and  the  tyranny  of  the  universal 
empire  called  forth.  A  spirit  was  roused  which  made  it  impossible 
that  men  should  look  upon  the  histories  of  Voltaire,  of  Hume,  and 
of  Robertson,  as  representing  the  feelings  and  mind  of  past  gene- 
rations ;  a  spirit  which  led  the  children  to  feel  that  there  was  a 
bond  between  them  and  their  fathers,  that  they  were  inheritors  of 
the  same  soil,  and  that  names,  and  memorials,  and  institutions, 


■ 

184  POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 

more  permanent  than  the  oaks  which  grew  upon  it,  had  been 
bequeathed  to  them  to  keep. 

But  this  patriotic  temper  did  not  much  survive  the  war  in  Ger- 
many and  the  Peninsula ;  and  though  the  historical  inquiries  to 
which  it  had  given  life  and  interest  were  not  neglected,  nay,  though 
they  began  to  be  more  valued  as  the  wisdom  and  learning  which 
had  been  exhibited  in  them  were  better  known,  yet  they  no  further 
influenced  the  popular  mind  than  as  they  supplied  the  armour  for 
resisting  some  of  its  most  prevalent  tendencies.  In  spite  of  the 
deep  and  solemn  warnings  which  those  who  engaged  in  them  have 
supplied,  schemes  of  universal  society,  which  pass  over  as  insig- 
nificant all  peculiarities  of  race,  and  of  language,  ridicule  custom 
and  the  reverence  of  ancestors,  and  annul  the  old  constitutions  in 
which  these  are  embodied,  have  been  most  rife  amongst  us.  It 
may  be  well  to  notice  two  or  three  of  them. 

Considering  the  change  which  has  been  gradually  taking  place 
in  the  philosophy  of  Europe, — a  change  which  only  of  late  years 
has  been  distinctly  perceptible,  but  which  has  been  in  progress  at 
least  from  the  commencement  of  the  present  century — it  may  seem 
a  matter  of  some  surprise  that  Mr.  Bentham,  a  philosopher  emphat- 
ically of  the  last  generation,  who  was  formed  in  the  school  of 
Locke  and  Hobbes,  and  who  aspired  to  reduce  their  maxims  to 
practice,  should  have  exercised  so  considerable  an  influence  over 
the  minds  of  persons  who  live  in  this  day.  The  fact  would  un- 
doubtedly be  difficult  of  explanation,  if  Mr.  Bentham's  influence 
had  continued,  and  had  overcome  those  which  were  opposed  to  it. 
To  understand  why  it  should  have  been  for  a  time  felt  both  in  his 
own  country  and  abroad  is  not,  I  think,  impossible.  He  came  into 
notice  when  the  great  Rousseau  experiment  had  been  made,  and 
had  led  to  the  consequences  of  which  we  have  spoken.  It  wTas 
impossible  for  any  one  to  deny  that  Burke  and  the  Constitutionalists 
had  gained  much  for  their  argument  by  that  experiment.  To  all 
appearance  they  were  right,  and  the  defenders  of  popular  govern- 
ments wrong.  Still  there  was  a  restless  feeling  that  the  trial  might 
have  been  conducted  differently,  and  that  then  it  wrould  have 
answered  to  the  wishes  of  those  who  commenced  it.  And  besides 
this,  the  several  countries  of  Europe,  and  presently,  also,  the 
Spanish  colonies  of  America,  were  in  that  naked  revolutionized 


4* 

POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS.  185 

condition  which  seemed  to  make  a  new  constitution  of  some  kind 
necessary  for  them.  These  feelings  Mr.  Bentham  met.  He  told 
men  that  the  Rousseau  scheme  was  false  in  its  very  conception  ; 
that  anterior  to  the  existence  of  society  we  have  no  rights  ;  that 
except  in  combination  we  are  good  for  nothing ;  that  the  end  of 
any  combination  is  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number 
of  the  units  who  enter  into  it ;  that  the  combination  is  preserved 
by  the  mutual  .suspicion  of  its  members,  and  by  such  contrivances 
as  dispose  the  governing  body  not  to  violate  the  interest  of  those 
whose  affairs  they  administer.  Having  these  few  and  comprehen- 
sible rules  to  guide  him,  the  writer  applied  a  very  acute  and  pains- 
taking intellect,  first,  to  the  construction  of  a  scheme  of  govern- 
ment and  legislation  which  should  accord  with  his  theory ;  secondly, 
to  a  detailed  exposure  of  the  various  contradictions  and  absurdities 
which  are  to  be  found  in  the  practice  of  different  nations,  and 
especially  of  his  own.  To  young  men  who  were  ashamed  of  being 
reckoned  sentimental,  and  who  yet  panted  for  the  glorious  common- 
wealth which  the  sentimental  school  had  promised,  the  sight  of  a 
new  society  built  upon  logic  was  most  consolatory  ;  their  elders 
could  more  easily  appreciate,  even  if  they  were  not  disposed  to 
acknowledge,  the  justice  of  Mr.  Bentham's  practical  charge,  that 
while  in  their  ordinary  acts  and  discourses  they  admitted  no  other 
principle  than  that  to  which  he  referred  all  things,  they  were  yet 
maintaining  various  institutions,  which  upon  that  principle  could 
not  be  justified  ;  that  they  were,  consequently,  carrying  out  the 
doctrine  of  self-interest  so  far  as  it  furthered  their  own  ends,  and 
repudiating  it  just  when  it  might  inconveniently  interfere  with  them. 
These  were  facts  which  could  not  be  gainsaid  ;  and  if  Mr.  Bentham 
could  have  contrived  that  his  system  should  seem  to  meddle  with 
nothing  but  law  and  government,  he  would  for  a  considerable  time 
have  retained  the  disciples  which  he  had  made,  and  even  have 
obtained  frequent  accessions  to  their  numbers.  After  the  shock  of 
the  French  revolution  and  of  the  French  war  had  subsided,  men 
whose  tendency  was  to  occupy  themselves  with  the  workings  of 
their  own  minds,  began  to  lose  all  interest  in  politics,  and  even  to 
decry  them  as  belonging  to  a  merely  outward  region  ;  they  could, 
therefore,  easily  consent  that  almost  any  system  upon  that  subject 
should  gain  currency.    But  they  soon  found  that  a  compact  organ- 


186 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


ized  political  scheme  must  involve  the  questions  which  they  looked 
upon  as  alone  sacred.  The  impossibility  of  distinguishing  social 
Utilitarianism,  of  reconciling  the  acknowledgment  of  a  certain 
ultimate  end  in  one  region  of  thought  with  the  positive  denial  of 
it  in  another,  became  apparent  to  those  whose  minds  were  most 
real,  most  impatient  of  mere  artificial  boundaries,  as  well  as  to 
those  who  were  strictly  and  formally  logical.  Poets  found  that  if 
their  art  could  be  defended  at  all,  it  must  be  merely  as  a  kind  of 
amusement,  upon  the  same  grounds  as  cards  or  horse-racing  : 
religious  men,  however  reluctant  they  might  be  to  acknowledge 
any  relation  between  such  topics,  were  driven  to  ask  themselves 
whether  the  doctrines  of  Paley  and  Bentham  could  be  reconciled 
with  that  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  and  if  not,  which  was  to 
be  abandoned  ?  This  school,  therefore,  found  itself  unexpectedly 
assailed  by  all  those  new  and  strange  thoughts  respecting  literature, 
metaphysics,  and  the  spiritual  universe,  which  had  been  gradually 
working  themselves  out  in  the  minds  of  men  in  different  parts  of 
Europe,  while  Mr.  Bentham  had  been  occupied  in  his  study  with  the 
rationale  of  evidence,  and  having  nothing  to  oppose  to  them,  it  could 
only  sound  a  retreat,  and  endeavour,  at  whatever  risk  of  theoretical 
or  practical  inconsistency,  to  defend  the  existence  of  its  philosophy 
by  circumscribing  the  application  of  it  within  very  narrow  limits. 
But  even  within  these  limits  it  has  no  safe  dwelling-place.  For 
while  the  desire  of  man  for  a  universal  polity  has  grown  every 
day  more  strong,  this  desire  has  connected  itself  more  and  more 
with  deep  feelings  and  passions,  has  had  less  and  less  to  do  with 
the  mere  calculating  understanding.  But  to  this  calculating  under- 
standing the  Benthamites  make  their  sole  appeal ;  by  this  they 
would  fashion  the  whole  scheme  of  human  life,  and  of  the  universe. 
The  right  thing  is  that  the  will  of  the  majority  should  be  omnipo- 
tent. But  what  calculus  have  they  discovered  for  measuring  the 
strength  which  lies  in  that  word — will— or  for  ascertaining  what 
is  to  become  of  all  theories  and  axioms  of  legislation  when  it  has 
obtained  supremacy  1 

Far  more  profound  in  its  conception,  and  I  think,  also,  more 
interesting  in  its  details,  than  the  system  of  which  I  have  been 
speaking,  was  that  which  was  proclaimed  in  France  about  twelve 
years  ago,  under  the  name  of  St.  Simonianism.    In  their  project  of 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


187 


society  the  Benthamites  discarded,  or  treated  as  mere  accidents,  all 
national  distinctions.  But  there  was  one  circumstance  in  the  con- 
dition of  man  which  could  not  be  wholly  accidental,  or  entirely  the 
fruit  of  bad  legislation.  Men  do  exist  in  families ;  it  would  seem 
that  in  the  most  fortunate  societies  the  principle  of  family  life  has 
been  most  recognised,  its  limits  most  accurately  defined.  Without 
taking  any  cognizance  of  this  fact,  the  Benthamites  created  a 
society  upon  the  hypothesis  that  mankind  is  an  aggregate  of  indi- 
vidual atoms.  The  St.  Simonians  felt  at  once  that  such  a  scheme 
was  a  practical  delusion  :  so  long  as  the  notions  of  mankind  con- 
tinue what  they  are,  so  long  as  the  morality  which  maintains  these 
notions,  and  is  maintained  by  them,  subsists,  men  will  be  continually 
acting,  speaking,  voting,  per  stirpes,  and  not  per  capita.  Thus  the 
aristocratical  idea  intrudes  itself;  the  existence  of  a  perfect  demo- 
cratical  fellowship  is  impossible.  Now  while  I  reverence  the  feel- 
ing, to  whatever  cause  it  may  be  traced,  which  hindered  the  En- 
glish Utilitarian  school  from  boldly  looking  down  into  the  gulf 
which  this  thought  opens — while  I  rejoice  that  they  dared  not 
sacrifice  their  moral  impulses  to  their  logical  consistency,  and 
though  I  can  easily  understand  how  they  may  have  persuaded 
themselves  that  they  were  logically  consistent,  because  it  was  not 
for  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number  that  all  family  ties 
should  be  sacrificed — I  must  yet  maintain  that  if  a  universal  society 
is  to  be  constructed,  either  upon  the  Utilitarian  maxim,  or  upon  the 
chacun  selon  sa  capacite  maxim  of  the  St.  Simonians,  it  is  an  indis- 
pensable preliminary  that  domestic  feelings,  associations,  sympa- 
thies, all  the  laws  by  which  they  are  upheld,  all  acknowledgment 
of  relationship  as  a  significant  fact,  should  be  extinguished.  The 
deepest  mind  that  ever  dwelt  in  a  mere  mortal  when  searching,  and 
that  with  the  noblest  and  purest  aims,  for  the  foundation  of  univer- 
sal society,  could  find  no  escape  from  this  conclusion ;  and  every 
new  project  for  the  actual  establishment  of  it  has  supplied  fresh 
evidence  that,  if  such  a  society  is  to  be  built  by  human  hands,  these 
must  be  the  conditions  of  it. 

But  the  St.  Simonians  felt  that  a  universal  society,  even  of  the 
kind  which  they  had  imagined  -  even  a  universal  bank — could  not 
be  established  by  mere  human  hands.  Here  was  another  indica- 
tion of  the  deeper  wisdom  which  was  at  work  amidst  their  extra- 


188 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


vagancies  and  contradictions.  They  must  have  asked  themselves 
as  they  repeated  the  words, "  chacun  selon  sa  capacite" — But  where 
shall  we  find  the  judge  of  capacities  ?  where  dwells  that  seeing 
eye  which  shall  perceive  in  each,  that  mighty  power  which  shall 
assign  to  each,  his  rightful  vocation?  The  question  carried  them 
into  a  mysterious  region.  There  must  be  some  supernatural  foun- 
dation for  this  commonwealth,  some  supernatural  superintendence 
over  it.  It  was  inconceivable  upon  any  other  hypothesis.  Once 
convinced  of  that  fact,  it  became  a  duty,  or  what  seemed  to  them 
the  same  thing,  a  logical  necessity,  to  invent  a  supernatural  ma- 
chinery, and  assume  the  airs  of  inspired  men.  Upon  this  fraud  of 
course  followed  every  species  of  absurdity  and  falsehood, —  under 
the  weight  of  these  the  system  sank  rapidly.  French  philosophers 
were  not  yet  prepared  for  an  Apollonius  in  the  nineteenth  century  ; 
they  had  not  yet  learnt  to  feel  as  Porphyry  felt,  that  there  was  a 
kingdom  in  the  world  which,  without  the  help  of  some  mythical 
hero,  could  not  be  opposed.  Possibly,  if  the  vision  of  such  a  king- 
dom should  become  more  clear  and  threatening, some  will  be  driven 
to  that  resource,  and  then  St.  Simonianism  will  reappear,  under' 
another  name  and  form,  to  try  whether  it  can  satisfy  the  inextin- 
guishable longing  in  human  hearts  for  a  human  fellowship. 

The  socialism  of  Mr.  Owen  is  wholly  unlike  the  St.  Simonian 
doctrine  in  all  its  more  striking  and  philosophical  features,  but  for 
that  very  reason  it  may  obtain  for  a  time  a  wider  popularity.  A 
benevolent  person  established  a  factory  in  a  certain  district  of  Scot- 
land upon  a  principle  which  made  it  a  blessing,  not  a  curse,  to  its 
inmates  and  the  neighbourhood.  One  who  had  taken  part  in  this 
experiment,  though  he  did  not  originate  it,  adopted  the  very  plau- 
sible notion  that  a  similar  arrangement  might  be  applicable  in  all 
our  manufacturing  districts.  The  problem  how  to  deal  with  the 
population  concentrated  there,  is  the  most  awful  one  which  presents 
itself  to  the  modern  politician  ;  any  one  who  could  offer  but  a  sug- 
gestion on  the  subject,  especially  if  it  were  the  result  of  experience, 
was  entitled  to  a  patient  hearing.  When  Mr.  Owen  showed  that 
men,  brought  by  certain  contrivances  under  a  laborious,  kindly, 
self-denying  superintendence,  would  be  more  happily  situated  than 
those  who  were  merely  treated  as  animals  capable  of  producing  a 
certain  quantity  of  cotton  twist,  the  demonstration  was  not  the  less 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


189 


valuable  because  the  result  of  it  might  have  been  anticipated. 
But  by  a  process  (alas  !  most  natural)  he  went  on  to  the  convic- 
tion that  the  whole  secret  lay  in  the  particular  machinery  which 
he  recommended :  then,  by  another  step,  to  the  further  conclusion 
that  such  a  machinery  was  in  itself  capable  of  producing  every 
desirable  moral  result.    That  rubicon  once  passed,  it  needed  only 
a  mind  somewhat  more  generalizing,  daring,  and  self-conceited 
than  that  which  is  found  in  the  majority  of  men,  one  withheld  by 
no  historical  knowledge  and  few  intellectual  impediments  from  ex- 
periments for  the  disorganization  of  society,  to  produce  a  preacher 
of  the  doctrine  that  men  are  mere  creatures  of  circumstances,  and 
that  by  a  readjustment  of  circumstances  their  condition  may  be 
completely  reformed.    The  necessary  corollaries  from  these  propo- 
sitions worked  themselves  out  by  degrees,  without  the  help  of  any 
intellectual  subtlety,  as  the  obstructions  to  the  new  scheme  made 
themselves  manifest : — whatever  principles,  practices,  institutions 
existing  among  men  were  connected  with  the  idea  of  a  will  or  spirit 
in  us  which  might  be  superior  to  circumstances,  must  be  abandoned. 
That  all  forms  of  religious  faith  should  be  included  among  these 
was  inevitable;  but  it  is  a  discovery  of  the  highest  practical  value 
which  the  Owenites  have  been  permitted  to  enforce,  though  they 
certainly  were  not  the  first  to  make  it,  that  Marriage  is  in  the  same 
category,  that  its  meaning  or  validity  cannot  be  maintained,  either 
logically  or  practically,  when  the  existence  of  a  spiritual  principle 
and  of  spiritual  obligations  is  denied. 

Owenisin  may  be  described  as  an  attempt,  upon  a  larger  scale 
than  Benthamism,  to  apply  to  society  universally  the  maxims  which 
have  been  already  adopted  by  certain  of  the  classes  which  compose 
it.  The  worship  of  circumstances  is  the  habit  of  feeling  into  which 
the  easy  and  comfortable  part  of  mankind  naturally  fall ;  their  in- 
ward thought  is  that  their  houses  shall  continue  for  ever,  and  that 
thought  makes  them  at  once  indisposed  to  change,  and  skeptical 
about  the  existence  of  any  invisible  government.  When  the  poor 
men  say,  "  We,  too,  will  acknowledge  circumstances  to  be  all  in 
all,  we  will  cast  away  any  belief  in  that  which  is  invisible,  this 
world  shall  be  the  only  home  in  which  we  will  dwell,"  the  language 
may  well  appal  all  who  hear.  To  one  who  sympathizes  with  the 
poor  it  is  fearful,  because  of  that  which  it  shows  they  are  ready  to 


190 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


abandon.  To  one  who  has  no  sympathy  with  the  poor  it  is  fear- 
ful, because  of  that  which  it  shows  they  are  ready  to  take  away 
from  him.  Nevertheless,  be  it  observed,  the  force  of  these  asser- 
tions lies  in  that  very  point  in  which  they  are  anti-socialist — it  is 
the  "  we  will"  that  gives  them  all  their  meaning, — it  is  that  which 
imparts  to  the  dry  chips  of  Mr.  Owen's  theory  the  semblance  of 
vitality.  He  protests  against  the  existence  of  that  to  which  he 
owes  his  own  pertinacity,  and  all  the  effects  which  it  has  been  ever 
able  to  produce. 

Combination  therefore  in  its  simpler  forms,  combination  for  the 
purpose  of  assisting  the  will  of  the  majority,  and  enforcing  its  right 
to  be  heard  and  to  rule ;  combination  in  the  form  of  trades'  unions, 
and  chartist  unions  (I  use  language  derived  from  our  English  expe- 
rience, but,  I  fear,  by  no  means  unintelligible  to  the  members  of  other 
nations,  at  least  not  to  Frenchmen);  combination — not  divested  of 
religious  sympathies,  but  with  a  piteous  fury  striving  to  seize  and  to 
appropriate  them  to  its  own  purpose ; — this,  it  seems  to  me,  is  much 
more  really  the  characteristic  of  our  times,  is  much  more  really 
fearful,  because  it  carries  with  it  so  many  more  elements  of  real 
power,  than  all  the  schemes  and  systems  for  the  reconstruction  of 
the  universe.  No  doubt  every  one  of  these  schemes  embodies  some 
truth  which  cannot  be  lost.  The  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number,  though  it  may  be  the  most  idle  and  insignificant  of  all 
formulas  till  each  one  of  its  substantives  and  adjectives  has  been 
translated,  must  yet  contain  a  meaning  which  will  somehow  or 
other  be  realized.  The  phrase  chacun  selon  sa  cwpacite,  indicates  a 
persuasion  of  gifts  appropriated  to  peculiar  vocations  and  offices 
which  we  cannot  afford  to  part  with ;  the  idea  of  co-operation,  on 
which  Owen  dwells,  is  one  of  wonderful  depth  and  importance. 
But  each  of  these  is  chiefly  remarkable  as  the  shrine  of  a  feeling 
which  it  cannot  satisfy,  and  of  a  conviction  which  it  labours  to 
stifle, — the  feeling,  I  mean,  that  a  universal  society  is  needful  to 
man  ;  the  conviction  that  if  there  be  such  a  society,  the  treatment 
of  man  as  a  voluntary  or  a  spiritual  being  must  be  the  character- 
istic distinction  of  it. 

3.  Among  the  notions  which  Rousseau  scattered  about  the 
world,  some  of  the  most  striking  and  startling,  as  every  one  knows, 
had  reference  to  education.    The  commonwealth  of  Plato,  said  the 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


191 


author  of  "Emile,"  is  neither  more  nor  less  than  a  scheme  of  edu- 
cation ;  and  when  the  true  commonwealth  which  answers  to  that 
dream  shall  rise  out  of  the  ruins  of  the  old  form  of  society,  the 
question,  how  education  is  to  be  conducted,  will  be  the  one  which 
will  absorb  all  others  into  itself.  Men,  who  started  from  the  most 
opposite  point  to  Rousseau,  and  took  the  most  different  directions 
from  him  and  from  each  other,  adopted  this  opinion.  It  began  to 
be  believed  that  education  would  be  a  substitute  for  prisons,  peni- 
tentiaries, and  hangmen,  and  that  consequently  statesmen  wrere, 
above  all  other  men,  bound  to  interest  themselves  in  it.  These 
feelings  received  a  shock  from  the  events  of  the  French  Revolution. 
As  the  awfulness  and  dignity  of  Law  began  again  to  be  acknow- 
ledged, the  notion  of  substituting  more  benignant  influences  for  its 
punishments  and  terrors  was  scouted;  the  education  doctrine  w?as 
regarded  as  part  of  the  sentimental  creed  respecting  the  goodness 
of  human  nature ;  that  creed  having  been  proved  to  be  absurd — it 
having  been  seen  how  little  man,  left  to  himself,  either  can  do,  or 
wishes  to  do,  without  prisons  or  guillotines, — the  different  infe- 
rences from  it  must  also  be  abandoned.  To  some  such  feelings  as 
this  language  indicates, — feelings  which  seldom  shaped  themselves 
into  definite  thoughts  or  arguments,  but  which  exercised  a  powerful 
influence,  nevertheless, — we  may  attribute  the  dislike  to  popular 
education  which  was  manifested,  especially  in  England,  by  the  sup- 
porters of  existing  institutions. 

But  both  parties  in  the  controversy  had  forgotten  one  important 
point — Education  must  henceforth,  said  the  disciple  of  the  new 
school,  be  the  grand  agent  and  influence  in  the  world.  Nonsense, 
replied  the  English  country  gentleman,  wre  will  stand  in  the  old 
ways,  we  will  do  as  our  forefathers  did  before  us.  Well !  but 
what  are  the  old  ways  ?  what  did  our  forefathers  before  us  ?  His- 
tory shows  that  they  attached  as  much  importance  to  education  as 
Rousseau  himself  could  do — that  they  believed  it  to  be  that  with- 
out which  prisons  and  penitentiaries  were  perfectly  ineffectual — 
which  had  powers  that  wTere  never  intrusted  to  them.  It  is  evident 
that  they  had  no  thought  of  confining  education  to  any  class,  for 
they  were  continually  making  provision  for  the  training  of  youths 
whose  main  qualification  was  their  poverty.  The  discovery  of  this 
fact  was  fatal  to  the  argument  against  the  philosophers.    For  a 


192 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


time  it  decided  the  practical  question  in  their  favour.  The  old  in- 
stitutions for  education  had  been  abused  in  England  by  carelessness 
or  selfishness,  had  been  destroyed  upon  the  continent  by  revolution- 
ary violence  ;  and  in  the  one  and  the  other  were  multitudes  growing 
up  with  all  the  new  notions  about  popular  power  and  will,  with  all 
the  new  indisposition  to  bow  down  before  authorities  merely  be- 
cause they  were  established.  Jails  could  not  be  provided  for  all, 
or  if  they  could,  it  might  in  time  be  a  question  who  would  be  the 
jailors.  Therefore  the  statesmen  began  to  say,  we  must  have  fresh 
schools ;  the  old  have  served  indifferently  well  to  train  those  who 
have  a  national  position ;  they  are  not  meant  for  those  masses 
which  have  none  ;  they  may  train  those  who  desire  instruction,  and 
will  make  sacrffices  to  obtain  it ;  they  can  be  of  no  service  to  those 
who  look  upon  it  scarcely  as  a  blessing,  who  scarcely  know  what 
it  means. 

It  is  evident,  I  think,  that  these  thoughts  have  worked  a  great 
change  in  the  minds  of  all  men  upon  these  subjects.  I  say  of  all 
men,  for  the  change  is  as  remarkable  in  those  who  have  declared 
education  to  be  the  panacea,  as  in  those  who  have  but  lately  been 
awakened  to  a  sense  of  its  necessity.  The  former  used  to  urge  the 
great  advantage  it  wrould  be  to  the  poor  to  have  the  means  of 
intellectual  cultivation  placed  within  their  reach  :  how  many  new 
pleasures  they  would  be  able  to  command,  how  many  temptations 
they  might  avoid.  The  latter  were  able  to  rebut  such  arguments 
by  plausible  appeals  to  fact.  Did  the  boys  of  the  schools  acquire 
these  new  tastes  1  were  they  the  better  for  their  knowledge  1  was 
the  population  more  refined  or  more  moral?  I  know  not  where 
such  controversies  could  end,  or  what  violent  twisting  of  statistics 
there  might  have  been  on  each  side  in  order  to  make  out  the  the- 
orem which  was  to  be  demonstrated.  But  the  advocates  of  educa- 
tion now  say,  Look  at  these  masses  of  human  beings ;  it  is  not  a 
question  what  you  should  do  to  amuse  or  benefit  them,  but  what 
you  must  do  in  order  to  govern  them,  in  order  to  prevent  them  from 
destroying  the  land  and  themselves.  You  have  found  the  ordinary 
resources  of  government  fail ;  you  have  proved  how  inadequate 
religion  is  when  it  only  assumes  the  character  of  a  support  to  law ; 
you  must  resort  to  some  other  means.  You  may  laugh  at  the 
notion  of  a  silent  moral  influence,  such  as  education  pretends  to 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


193 


possess,  being  efficient ;  but  does  not  history — do  not  these  living 
masses,  laugh  at  the  notion  of  your  physical  appliances  being  effi- 
cient 1  Surely  this  is  different  language  altogether.  The  answer 
to  it  is  not  easy.  There  is  no  answer  to  it  but  the  sleepy  determi- 
nation not  to  think  about  the  matter  till  we  are  compelled  to  think 
of  it  by  a  revolution. 

In  this  change  of  language,  however,  some  other  changes  are 
involved  which  may  not  be  obvious.    There  may  be  a  hundred 
differences  about  the  instruction  which  ought  to  be  communicated, 
and  the  persons  who  should  communicate  it,  but  those  who  defend 
education  upon  these  grounds  are  agreed  so  far  as  this — Whatever 
be  the  right  agency  or  instruments  for  getting  a  dominion  over  the 
will  of  these  masses,  it  is  the  attainment  of  this  dominion  which  is 
our  object.    It  signifies  not  much  in  what  phrases  this  object  is 
expressed.    I  can  easily  conceive  that  earnest  and  able  defenders 
of  education  may  be  loth  to  adopt  the  conviction  into  which  I 
remarked  that  many  political  students  had  been  led  by  comparing 
the  theories  and  the  events  of  the  last  fifty  years — very  loth  to 
speak  of  man  as  a  mysterious  being,  whose  natural  inclinations, 
if  they  be  followed,  make  him  a  transgressor  of  law  and  order, 
and  an  enemy  of  his  fellows,  but  who  may  be  raised  above  those 
inclinations,  may  attain  a  true  freedom  which  sets  him  above  the 
penalty  of  laws  because  he  has  no  wish  to  break  them — such 
expressions  may  appear  to  them  strange  and  fantastical,  and  most 
unlike  those  of  the  school  in  which  they  have  been  trained.  Nev- 
ertheless they  may  mean  very  nearly  what  the  persons  who  indulge 
in  such  odd  mystical  talk  mean  ;  they  may  confess  by  a  number  of 
words  and  acts  that  they  do  look  upon  education  as  a  won- 
drous power  which  is  to  act  upon  men  in  a  very  wondrous  manner; 
yet  not  in  the  way  of  a  charm,  not  in  a  way  inconsistent  with  their 
constitution  :  a  power  which  is  by  some  means  to  reach  a  faculty 
or  principle,  call  it  what  you  like,  that  swords  and  clubs  cannot 
reach.    There  is,  I  think,  a  very  general  consent  indeed  about  this 
point,  however  diverse  the  elements  may  be  which  make  up  that 
consent.    For  instance,  those  who  say  that  it  is  hopeless  to  com- 
municate religious  instruction  to  all  the  members  of  a  nation,  and 
that,  therefore,  (what  they  call)  secular  instruction  must  be  com- 
municated to  them  first,  defend  the  proposition  upon  these  two 

13 


194 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


grounds,  one  that  the  perils  of  leaving  the  people  untaught  are 
infinite,  there  being  everywhere  threatenings  of  popular  outrage 
which  the  legislature  cannot  put  down — the  other,  that  there  must 
be  something  common  to  all  men,  something  which  all  men  may 
receive,  and  that  this  cannot  be  the  same  with  those  sect-notions 
and  opinions  wThich  manifestly  do  not  belong  to  all.  Such  is  the 
line  of  their  argument.  Taken  simply  as  it  stands,  it  does,  I  submit, 
lead  us  into  reflections  quite  unlike  any  that  would  be  naturally 
suggested  by  the  ablest  treatises  on  education  in  the  last  century. 
It  sets  us  upon  thinking  what  manner  of  power  that  must  be  which 
can  address  itself  to  a  whole  body  of  human  creatures,  and  can 
call  forth  that  in  each  of  them  w^hich  will  give  him  the  rights  of  a 
Man,  and  make  him  a  fellow-worker  with  his  brethren.  Sad 
experience  has  convinced  thoughtful  persons  that  the  secret  does 
not  lie  in  the  mechanical  contrivances  for  bringing  a  number  of 
children  together  in  a  school,  wmich  were  produced  as  the  perfect 
cure  for  the  nation's  evils  a  few  years  ago.  These  contrivances 
organize  and  discipline  masses  into  a  certain  stupid  material  con- 
sistency, or  they  call  out  now  and  then  into  dangerous  self-exalting 
activity  the  powers  of  one  or  two  clever  pupils  ;  they  do  not  infuse 
into  the  whole  body  a  quiet  life,  which  may  circulate  regularly  and 
continually  through  each  of  its  distinct  members.  Again,  the 
different  Protestant  systems  and  sects,  as  I  have  said  already,  are 
found  inadequate  for  the  purpose ;  they  scarcely  recognise  the 
existence  of  that  in  the  pupil  which  can  be  spoken  to  and  called 
forth  ;  they  divide  instead  of  harmonizing.  Still  it  would  seem 
that  there  must  be  such  a  power  somewThere — who  shall  tell  us 
where  1 

4.  The  method  which  has  been  used  for  cutting  this  knot  explains 
the  last  remarkable  peculiarity  in  our  modern  political  views.  All 
those  bodies  w?hich  profess  a  voluntary  character  having  been 
found  unequal  to  the  task  of  conducting  education,  the  conclusion 
has  appeared  inevitable,  that  the  government  of  each  nation  should 
undertake  the  formation  and  superintendence  of  it.  Any  one  who 
has  soberly  set  himself  to  consider  in  what  way  it  is  possible  to 
provide  for  this  dire  necessity,  will  not  be  surprised  that  this  should 
offer  itself  to  hundreds  as  the  only  refuge  from  positive  despair. 
However  many  a  cherished  notion  of  personal  and  domestic  liberty 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


195 


they  may  be  obliged  to  abandon,  however  painful  the  thought  may 
be  that  we  in  the  nineteenth  century  have  no  better  resource  than 
that  which  we  have  learnt  to  consider  unsatisfactory  and  dangerous 
in  the  old  republics  of  Greece,  still  a  wise  lover  of  his  species  will 
not  be  hindered  by  such  thoughts  from  adopting  that  which  he  is 
sure  is  the  only  practical  means  for  its  relief.  But  there  are  some 
perplexing  reflections  which  will  intrude  themselves,  before  he 
attains  to  that  perfect  certainty.  Is  it  not  somewhat  strange  that 
w?e  should  be  asserting  this  marvellous  power  for  the  state,  just  at 
the  time  when  there  is  most  reluctance  to  acknowledge  even  those 
powers  which  evidently  do  belong  to  it  ?  Is  not  the  Will  of  the 
multitude  asserting  its  independence  of  the  civil  power,  and  are  we 
not  devising  a  remedy  for  this  very  exigency  ?  Have  not  the  govern- 
ments in  most  European  countries  been  for  some  time  past  rather 
hastily  undressing  themselves  of  the  spiritual  properties  and  func- 
tions to  which  they  had  in  earlier  times  laid  claim  ?  Are  not  those 
called  illiberal  which  hesitate  to  perform  these  acts  of  renunciation  ? 
and  is  it  not  a  little  inconsistent  that  these  governments  should  at 
the  selfsame  moment,  be  assuming  that  which,  by  their  own  con- 
fession, is  in  the  very  strictest  and  most  remarkable  sense  an 
authority  over  the  spirits  of  Men  ?  I  say,  by  their  own  confession, 
for  do  we  escape  at  all  from  the  difficulty,  by  saying  that  the  state 
shall  only  have  the  charge  of  secular  education, — other  portions  of 
it  being  left  to  more  peculiar  and  individual  interests  ?  Is  not  that 
which  we  propose  to  ourselves  by  our  education — the  attainment 
of  a  certain  influence  over  those  human  hearts  which  are  entertain- 
ing such  fearful  dreams  of  independence  and  defiance  ?  Is  not 
this  the  very  plea — the  only  plea  for  the  state's  interference — that 
its  existence  is  endangered  by  ignorance  and  self-will  ?  And  must 
not,  therefore,  the  education  of  which  the  state  undertakes  the 
superintendence,  most  especially  aim — by  such  means  as  seem  the 
likeliest  to  answer — (it  matters  not  what  epithet  you  give  them)  at 
the  accomplishment  of  this  design  ? 

This  is  a  contradiction  by  which  I  fancy  the  practical  statesman 
will  be  haunted  continually  j  which  will  perplex  him  far  more  in 
action  than  even  in  meditation.  To  satisfy  the  cry  for  a  power 
which  shall  not  be  merely  legal — not  merely  punitive— but  which 
shall  act  directly  upon  the  human  spirit,  that  the  legal  and  punitive 


196 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS. 


sanctions  may  make  their  appeal  to  the  consciences  of  men,  not  to 
the  fears  of  brutes — you  inspire  a  body  with  this  power,  or  at  least 
you  force  it  into  acts  implying  this  power,  which  is  saying  contin- 
ually, that  it  can  deal  with  nothing  internal, — can  take  cognizance 
only  of  overt  acts.  To  satisfy  the  cry  for  a  universal  body,  in 
which  men  shall  be  regarded  as  human  beings  and  not  merely  as 
the  members  of  a  local  society,  you  insist  that  the  government  of 
a  local  society  shall  assume  to  itself  a  universal  human  character, 
when  all  the  new  schemes  for  the  management  of  the  world  are 
bearing  witness  that  it  never  has  had,  and  never  can  have  such  a 
character  ;  that  its  only  security  consists  in  its  distinctions  and  lim- 
itations. Still  the  difficulty  remains :  if  there  be  no  spiritual 
universal  society — and  all  attempts  to  create  one  in  this  nineteenth 
century  have  been  very  abortive, — the  state  must,  at  any  hazard  of 
inconsistency,  in  despite  of  every  danger  to  individual  liberty, 
notwithstanding  the  strong  and  increasing  feeling  of  its  incompe- 
tency, assume  the  appearance,  and  perform  the  duties  of  one. 


PART  II. 


OF  THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  AND  THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 

CHAPTER  I. 

RECAPITULATION. 

The  conclusion  to  which  we  have  arrived  seems  to  be  this — 
that  the  principles  asserted  by  the  religious  societies  which  have 
been  formed  in  Europe  since  the  Reformation  are  solid  and  im- 
perishable ;  that  the  systems  in  which  those  principles  have  been 
embodied  were  faulty  in  their  origin,  have  been  found  less  and  less 
to  fulfil  their  purpose  as  they  have  grown  older,  and  are  now  ex- 
hibiting the  most  manifest  indications  of  approaching  dissolution. 
Now  I  have  alluded,  when  speaking  of  modern  philosophical 
movements,  to  certain  prevalent  and  popular  statements  which 
seem  at  first  sight  very  closely  to  resemble  those  which  have  been 
the  result  of  our  inquiry.  The  doctrine  that  systems,  religions, 
churches,  are  dying  out,  but  that  they  have  been  the  clothing  of 
certain  important  ideas  which  will  survive  their  extinction,  and 
wrhich  it  is  the  business  of  wise  men  to  note,  preserve,  and  perhaps 
furnish  with  a  new  vesture,  is  one  which  I  cannot  be  expected  to 
entertain  ;  nay,  to  which  if  this  book  mean  any  thing  I  must  be 
directly  opposed  ;  nevertheless  a  conscientious  reader  may  find  it 
difficult  to  discover  what  is  the  point  at  which  this  doctrine  and 
mine  diverge.  It  is  necessary  for  the  purpose  of  making  the  con- 
nection of  what  has  been  said  with  what  I  am  about  to  say  intelli- 
gible, that  I  should  relieve  him  of  this  embarrassment ;  and  I  know 
no  way  in  which  I  can  do  it  so  effectually  as  by  reminding  him  of 
the  different  points  of  evidence  which  have  gradually  offered  them- 
selves to  us  as  we  have  proceeded. 

L  The  doctrine  which,  upon  the  authority  of  the  old  Quaker 
books,  and  in  opposition  to  one  of  their  modern  teachers,  I  main- 


198 


RECAPITULATION. 


tained  to  be  the  fundamental  one  of  Quakerism,  is,  that  man  is  a 
twofold  creature,  having  inclinations  towards  sensible  things — 
being  united  to  the  divine  Word  by  trusting  in  whom  he  may  rise 
above  these  inclinations  and  attain  to  a  spiritual  life  and  commu- 
nion. Of  all  persons,  those  who  seem  the  most  unlike  the  primitive 
Quakers  are  modern  philosophers,  artists,  and  politicians  ;  yet  we 
found  that  various  persons  belonging  to  these  different  classes  had 
been  led  by  different  processes  of  thought  to  adopt  the  maxim 
which  had  formed  the  great  obstacle  to  the  belief  of  Fox's  prin- 
ciple. "  It  cannot  be  true,"  said  religious  people,  "  because  man 
as  such  apart  from  a  peculiar  religious  vocation  and  impulse  is  not 
spiritual ;"  "  It  cannot  be  true,"  said  the  philosophers  of  the  last 
generation,  *  because  he  is  not  susceptible  of  a  religious  vocation 
and  impulse  at  all — he  is  simply  a  creature  of  flesh  and  blood." 
Both  these  opinions  would  be  disowned  by  those  who  claim  to  re- 
present the  enlightenment  of  our  time  ;  they  would  say  "  man  as 
man  has  spiritual  powers,  and  is  a  spiritual  creature." 

Now  it  is  probable  that  many  of  those  who  use  that  language 
would  produce  it  as  an  instance  of  the  way  in  which  a  doctrine 
has  been  disencumbered  of  its  ancient  form  and  been  reduced  to  a 
pure  and  simple  essence — "  In  the  acknowledgment  of  a  spiritual 
life  or  existence  in  man,"  they  would  say,  "  we  uphold  Fox's 
meaning,  we  only  take  away  from  it  that  phraseology  with  which 
the  religious  traditions  of  former  centuries  had  invested  it."  My 
object  is  not  to  argue  the  point  w7hether  this  be  so  or  not,  but  to 
show  that  our  observations  have  not  led  us  to  this  conclusion,  but 
to  a  most  opposite  one.  It  seemed  to  us  that  a  man  believing  he 
has  certain  spiritual  capacities  within  him,  is  just  the  person  who 
is  obliged  to  consider  under  what  conditions  these  capacities  exist; 
that  it  was  this  problem  about  which  Fox  was  occupied  ;  that  the 
sense  of  certain  upward  tendencies  within  him  wThich  were  con- 
tinually restrained  and  resisted,  instead  of  giving  him  peace  and 
happiness  was  the  very  cause  of  his  torment :  that  wre  may  talk 
generally  about  our  spiritual  power  and  existence,  but  that  the 
moment  we  practically  realize  them,  amidst  all  the  contradictions 
under  which  they  exist  in  this  world,  they  become  so  involved  with 
awful  feelings  of  responsibility,  with  the  vision  of  an  unknown 
world,  with  the  certainty  of  moral  evil,  that  we  are  glad  to  escape 


RECAPITULATION. 


199 


from  them  into  materialism :  that  this  escape  being  now  impossible 
we  must  inquire  whence  these  spiritual  desires  and  impulses  have 
come,  by  what  they  are  upheld,  whither  they  are  tending ;  that 
these  questions  lead  directly  to  the  principle  which  Fox  asserted, 
that  it  may  be  omitted  or  substituted  for  some  other  in  a  system, 
but  that  it  must  be  steadily  faced  and  considered  by  every  man 
who  is  really  engaged  in  the  world's  conflict ;  that  modern  thinkers 
are  perpetually  exhibiting  their  want  of  it,  especially  when  they 
speak  of  our  self-consciousness,  the  necessity  of  it,  the  misery  and 
falsehood  of  it ;  that  the  words  *  Not  I  but  Christ  in  me"  are  the 
answer  to  these  perplexities ;  that  we  may  search  heaven  and 
earth  before  we  find  any  other.  And  if  we  are  asked  on  what 
ground,  then,  we  affirm  that  the  Quaker  system  has  proved  inade- 
quate— the  answer  would  be,  Precisely  on  this  ground,  that  it  has 
failed  in  giving  a  clear  definite  expression  to  the  idea  of  Fox ;  that 
it  has  reduced  that  idea  too  nearly  into  a  vague  synonyme  of  the 
notion  that  we  have  certain  spiritual  capacities  or  feelings  within 
us,  that  it  has  not  exhibited  to  men  the  object  on  whom  Fox 
affirmed  that  their  spiritual  capacities  and  feelings  were  to  be  ex- 
ercised. 

The  founder  of  Quakerism  is  however  not  much  known  to  the 
ordinary  philosopher :  he  would  be  much  more  anxious  to  show 
that  he  had  retained  all  that  is  really  precious  in  the  teaching  of 
the  great  Reformer.  Our  mere  men  of  letters,  who  reverence  Leo 
and  believe  Erasmus  to  have  protested  quite  as  much  as  was  need- 
ful against  the  abominations  of  his  time,  regard  Luther,  who  knew 
nothing  of  statues  and  wrote  indifferent  Latin,  with  positive  aver- 
sion ;  but  the  more  earnest  men  among  us — those  especially  who 
believe  that  European  society  has  been  making  continual  progress 
from  darkness  to  light — speak  of  him  as  one  who  worked  mightily 
for  the  overthrow  of  opinions  based  upon  mere  authority  and  tradi- 
tion, and  prepared  the  way  for  the  utterance  of  thoughts  which  he 
himself  would  have  rejected  with  horror.  I  am  not  now  alluding 
to  the  ignorant  declaimers  who  boast  of  Luther  because  he  exalted 
the  understanding  in  place  of  faith  ;  but  of  those  who  being  really 
acquainted  with  his  writings,  are  aware  that  he  as  much  deserves 
that  praise  as  Brutus  deserved  to  be  canonized  by  the  French  Sans 
Culotte  for  the  noble  plebeian  spirit  which  led  him  to  slay  the 


200 


RECAPITULATION. 


4 


great  aristocrat  Julius  Cesar ;  and  who  would  consider  it  a  very 
ill  compliment  to  any  one  that  he  wanted  faith  himself  and  wished 
to  destroy  it  in  others.  They  will  cheerfully  admit  that  the  asser- 
tion, "  A  man  is  justified  by  faith"  is  more  characteristic  of  Luther 
than  his  opposition  to  popes  or  masses.  They  will  allow  that  the 
different  acts  of  his  outward  life  had  all  a  more  or  less  direct  refer- 
ence to  that  principle.  But  then  they  would  say,  "  this  principle 
when  it  is  taken  out  of  the  swaddling  bands  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury and  allowed  to  move  freely,  means  just  this,  that  it  is  the 
inward  state  of  a  man  and  not  his  performance  of  certain  pre- 
scribed acts,  or  even  the  worthiness  of  his  outward  conduct  which 
entitles  him  to  be  called  good — not  what  he  seems  nor  even  what 
he  does,  but  what  he  is  constitutes  him  a  right  and  true  man. 
This  truth  had  been  set  at  naught  by  the  Church  of  that  day  :  by 
the  vehemence  with  which  he  declared  it  and  compelled  men  to 
listen  to  it,  Luther  established  his  chief  claim  to  the  gratitude  of 
mankind." 

I  am  well  convinced  that  this  principle  had  been  practically 
denied  by  the  Romanists,  and  that  Luther  wTas  the  most  powerful 
of  all  instruments  in  re-asserting  it.  But  we  have  seen  reason  to 
believe  that  George  Fox  maintained  the  doctrine  of  an  inward  right- 
eousness quite  as  strongly  as  the  German  ;  and  yet  that  there  was 
a  very  marked  difference  between  them.  The  difference  seemed 
to  consist  in  this,  that  while  Fox  urged  his  disciples  to  exercise 
their  faith  in  a  spiritual  being,  the  Lord  of  their  spirits — Luther 
delighted  to  declare  that  that  Being  had  actually  taken  human 
flesh,  had  died  a  human  death,  and  by  these  acts  had  redeemed  us 
from  a  curse  and  justified  us  before  his  Father.  If  Luther  was,  as 
his  modern  admirers  constantly  affirm  that  he  was,  eminently 
straightforward  and  practical,  impatient  of  abstractions,  dealing 
in  all  plain  homely  images — here,  it  seemed  to  us,  lay  the  secret  of 
these  qualities.  It  was  no  fantastic  Being  he  was  speaking  of,  no 
mere  idea ;  not  even  merely  an  object  for  spiritual  apprehension, 
though  that  in  the  highest  degree  ;  it  was  one  who  had  identified 
himself  with  men,  had  by  a  series  of  outward  acts — those  which 
the  creed  announces — established  his  human  as  well  as  his  divine 
character.  It  struck  us  that  this,  which  is  in  the  strictest  sense  the 
Lutheran  characteristic,  was  particularly  necessary  as  a  complc- 


RECAPITULATION. 


201 


ment  of  the  Quaker  doctrine ;  that  this  without  it  soon  passes  into 
mere  vapour.  But  be  that  as  it  may,  it  was  this  peculiarity  in 
Luther's  preaching  which  enabled  him  to  effect  the  overthrow  of 
existing  superstitions,  and  so  to  be  (as  we  are  told)  the  precursor 
of  greater  deliverances  hereafter.  No  doubt  the  fact  of  the  Incar- 
nation was  fully  recognised  by  the  Romanists,  but  by  certain  no- 
tions about  inward  and  inherent  righteousness,  and  by  certain 
practices  which  were  grounded  on  these  notions,  this  fact  had  been 
deprived  of  its  significance.  It  had  ceased  to  be  a  witness  to  any  man 
of  what  he  was.  By  affirming  the  reality  of  this  fact  and  its  sig- 
nificance, Luther  got  rid  of  the  impositions  upon  the  understand- 
ing and  conscience,  which  the  practical  unbelief  of  it  had  made 
possible.  It  seemed  to  us  then,  judging  from  these  facts,  that  we 
do  not  merely  strip  Luther  of  his  dress,  but  that  we  destroy  the 
man  himself,  when  we  make  him  the  witness  for  a  principle  and 
not  for  a  fact,  that  wTe  do  not  preserve  that  quality  in  him  which 
enabled  him  to  be  a  reformer,  and  deprive  him  of  that  which  be- 
longed to  him  in  common  with  those  whom  he  reformed,  but  that 
we  take  from  him  that  wherein  his  reforming  powrer  consisted,  and 
leave  ourselves  to  the  certain  peril,  if  all  history  be  not  a  delusion, 
of  falling  under  those  sensible  tyrannies  from  which  he  was  per- 
mitted to  emancipate  us.  And  if  I  be  asked  again  in  this  case, 
what  then  is  my  objection  to  the  Lutheran  system,  I  answer  this 
and  no  other — that  it  does  not  bear  witness  for  the  all  importance 
of  that  fact  which  Luther  asserted  to  be  all  important ;  that  it 
teaches  us  to  believe  in  justification  by  faith  instead  of  to  believe  in 
a  Justifier  \  that  it  substitutes  for  Christ  a  certain  notion  or  scheme 
of  Christianity. 

Quakerism  and  pure  Protestantism  both  belong  chiefly,  if  not 
entirely,  to  the  region  of  individual  life  and  experience — Unitarian- 
ism  we  found  was  of  an  altogether  different  character;  it  took 
men  away  from  self-reflection  to  thoughts  about  nature  and  God. 
Nevertheless,  it  has  changed  its  complexion  as  men's  views  about 
themselves  have  changed ;  it  applied  material  standards  to  the  In- 
finite, so  long  as  it  was  the  habit  of  the  time  to  consider  men  as 
purely  material ;  when  that  habit  ceased,  it  began  to  decry  the 
ordinary  theological  language  as  too  earthly  and  definite.  Here 
then  perhaps  we  have  discovered  a  system  which  answers  exactly 


202  RECAPITULATION. 

to  the  philosophers'  demand,  which  readily  abandons  the  dress  of 
one  period  that  it  may  clothe  itself  in  that  of  another.  But  will  it 
be  said  that  this  is  merely  a  change  of  dress  1  Can  those  who 
just  now  represented  the  acknowledgment  of  man's  spiritual 
powers  as  the  very  essence  of  all  religion,  so  entirely  alter  their 
note  that  they  look  upon  it  too  merely  as  an  accident  ?  Accord- 
ing to  their  showing  Unitarianism  has  not  preserved  its  identity  at 
all — the  alteration  of  popular  opinion  has  abolished  its  very  nature 
and  substance.  But  it  seemed  to  us  that  this  was  not  the  case ; 
that  it  had  a  principle,  that  it  did  contain  something  which  is  con- 
stantly and  invariably  true.  The  hold  which  it  had  maintained  for 
a  time  over  earnest  minds  arose,  we  thought,  from  this,  that  it  de- 
clared the  unity  of  God,  the  absolute  love  of  God,  the  existence  of 
a  good  and  pure  state  for  mankind,  to  be  primary  truths  which  can- 
not be  altered  or  set  aside  by  any  experiences  or  any  dogmas.  These 
were  eternal  principles  not  subject  to  the  mutations  of  costume  or 
fashion  ;  needful  for  man,  needful  for  him  at  all  times.  And  the 
objection  which  we  made  to  the  Unitarian  system  was,  that  it  did  so 
feebly  and  miserably  represent  these  truths — nay,  that  it  practi- 
cally contradicted  them  as  no  other  system  ever  did ;  a  charge 
which  applies  to  the  modern  scheme  no  less  than  to  the  old  one  on 
grounds  even  more  forcible;  for  whereas  the  whole  virtue  of 
Unitarianism  consisted  in  its  asserting  the  existence  of  God  as  dis- 
tinct from  the  thoughts  and  apprehensions  of  men,  the  later  teach- 
ers are  continually  approaching  nearer  and  nearer  to  a  confusion 
between  our  own  spiritual  "  nature"  and  the  Being  whom  it  ac- 
knowledges. The  transition  from  this  stage  of  belief  to  the  wor- 
ship of  the  separate  feelings  and  moods  of  that  "  spiritual  nature," 
and  thence  the  prostration  before  them  in  the  shape  of  idols  is 
very  rapid  indeed.    Surely  a  strange  apotheosis  for  Unitarianism ! 

I  contend  then  that  the  principles  of  Fox,  of  Luther,  of  the 
Unitarians,  are  too  strong,  too  vital  to  bear  the  imprisonment  to 
which  they  have  been  subjected  in  the  different  systems  which  have 
been  invented  for  them ;  but  so  far  from  thinking  that  those  prin- 
ciples will  be  more  true  and  vital  when  they  have  lost  their  reli- 
gious and  personal  character,  and  have  been  translated  into  the 
terms  of  a  philosophical  theory,  I  believe  that  when  they  shall 
suffer  that  change  they  wall  lose  all  their  preciousness,  and  will  at- 


RECAPITULATION. 


203 


tain  the  perfection  of  the  impotence  and  insignificance  to  which 
hitherto  they  have  been  but  partially  reduced. 

II.  Seeing,  however,  that  these  principles,  even  in  the  time  of 
their  strength,  have  shown  a  disposition  to  clothe  themselves  in 
some  form  or  other,  nay,  that  it  is  only  in  times  of  great  weakness 
that  they  can  be  content  to  remain  merely  as  notions  or  opinions 
for  individual  minds;  we  are  bound  to  inquire  further,  what  this 
tendency  means,  and  how  it  is  possible  that  it  may  be  satisfied 
when  the  systems  which  have  owed  their  existence  to  it  shall 
satisfy  it  no  longer.  To  answer  this  question  we  must  refer  to 
another  class  of  facts  which  we  have  been  considering.  The 
second  distinguishing  Quaker  tenet  was,  that  there  is  a  spiritual 
and  universal  kingdom  established  in  the  world.  We  may  con- 
ceive, though  not  without  great  difficulty,  how  the  doctrine  re- 
specting the  Indwelling  Word  might  have  been  received  and  ac- 
knowledged as  a  doctrine  and  as  nothing  more — at  all  events  might 
have  appeared  to  Quakers  only  as  the  governing  law  of  their  own 
individual  lives.  But  it  is  obvious  that  this  tenet  ceases  to  be  one 
at  all  if  it  is  nothing  more — ceases  to  be  a  principle  for  individuals 
if  it  be  only  for  them.  That  there  should  be  such  a  kingdom,  and 
that  an  honest  man  believing  it  to  be  should  not  ask,  What  are  the 
conditions  of  citizenship  in  it  ?  is  incredible.  To  this  conviction 
then  we  trace  the  origin  of  the  Quaker  society  and  the  Quaker 
system :  by  entering  the  first  the  disciples  of  George  Fox  sought 
for  themselves  a  place  in  this  kingdom  ;  by  adopting  the  second, 
they  interpreted  to  themselves  and  others  its  nature  and  its  laws. 
And  therefore  our  main  inquiry  in  reference  to  the  society  was, 
Does  it  answer  to  this  character  ?  Does  it  even  any  longer  pro- 
fess to  answer  to  it  1  and  with  respect  to  the  system — what  is  there 
here  which  may  tell  us  the  secret  of  the  failure  to  which  the  his- 
tory of  the  body  bears  such  a  striking  witness?  I  will  not  now 
dwell  on  the  answer  to  this  question  further,  than  to  remark  that 
we  observed  a  resolute  eschewing  of  forms  to  be  one  of  the  main 
characteristics  of  the  Quaker  system,  and  a  dispostion  to  formalism 
one  of  the  most  striking  characteristics  of  the  Quaker  body.  But 
my  object  at  present  is  rather  to  remark  upon  the  faith  which  seemed 
to  make  the  existence  of  Quakerism  necessary,  than  upon  any  of 
its  good  or  evil  features. 


204  RECAPITULATION. 

Was  this  faith  a  new  one  ?  was  George  Fox  the  first  proclaim- 
er  of  it  ?  We  found  the  acknowledgment  of  a  spiritual  kingdom 
among  the  Reformers  as  well  as  among  the  Quakers — a  most 
strong  and  distinct  acknowledgment  of  it.  We  found  it  working 
so  strongly  in  Luther's  mind,  connecting  itself  so  closely  with  his 
recognition  of  a  divine  Person,  a  divine  Man,  as  the  object  of  all 
trust  and  allegiance,  as  to  make  him  most  reluctant  to  introduce  any 
theory  or  scheme  of  doctrine  which  might  eventually  become  a 
substitute  for  it :  we  found  at  the  same  time  that  it  at  last  urged 
him  and  the  other  Reformers  to  set  up  little  Churches  or  kingdoms 
of  their  own  because  they  could  not  imagine  or  discover  how  other- 
wise God's  purpose  could  be  accomplished.  And  we  found  that  it 
was  partly  the  unspiritual  character  of  these  bodies — their  mani- 
fest inadequacy  to  express  the  idea  of  Christ's  spiritual  kingdom, 
partly  the  importance  which  the  Reformers  and  their  followers  at- 
tached to  national  societies  and  the  confusion  that  seemed  to  have 
arisen  between  them  and  the  universal  body,  which  led  to  Fox's 
protest  in  the  subsequent  age. 

But  though  this  idea  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  kingdom  was 
not  new  in  the  seventeenth  century,  may  it  not  have  become  obso- 
lete in  the  nineteenth  ?  The  history  of  Unitarianism  was  an  im- 
portant link  in  the  evidence  on  this  subject.  WTe  found  that  in  the 
last  century  the  idea  of  a  spiritual  kingdom  was  distinctly  and 
formally  repudiated  by  those  who  were  most  admired  for  wisdom 
and  enlightenment ;  man  at  all  events  being  excluded  from  any 
concern  in  such  a  kingdom,  seeing  that  he  had  no  faculties  where- 
with he  could  take  cognizance  of  it.  At  the  same  time  the  idea  of 
a  very  comprehensive  world,  which  should  include  all  nations,  sys- 
tems, religions,  began  at  that  time  to  be  prevalent,  and  to  be  pro- 
duced in  opposition  to  the  different  sects  of  Christendom.  Here, 
then,  was  one  half  the  belief  which  had  belonged  to  other  ages, 
that  half  which  had  been  apparently  least  regarded  by  Protestants 
— trying  in  the  eighteenth  century  to  assert  itself  under  new  condi- 
tions and  to  the  exclusion  of  the  other  half.  But  if  the  Roman  em- 
pire, from  Augustus  to  Diocletian,  had  not  been  the  sufficient  type 
of  this  all  tolerant  all  including  vmld,  the  French  Empire  which 
succeeded  to  and  carried  out  the  speculations  of  the  last  generation 
was  a  fair  specimen  of  what  it  must  be.    While  this  Empire  was 


RECAPITULATION. 


205 


diffusing  philanthropy  through  Europe,  we  noticed  in  different  di- 
rections the  gradual  reappearance  of  that  other  element  in  the  idea 
of  a  kingdom  for  mankind,  which  this  philanthropy  had  cast  aside 
as  unnecessary.  First,  we  observed  a  religious  awakening — men 
becoming  strongly  convinced  that  there  is  a  spiritual  power  and  in- 
fluence at  work  among  them.  The  immediate  result  of  this 
awakening  was  a  greater  value  for  personal  religion  ;  then  it  led 
to  a  desire  among  those  who  had  felt  it  for  combination  and  fellow- 
ship in  the  promotion  of  spiritual  objects ;  finally,  to  the  inquiry 
whether  such  a  combination  must  not  have  a  spiritual  foundation, 
whether  it  must  not  be  connected  with  belief  and  worship.  Then 
we  were  struck  by  various  indications  among  philosophical  men  of 
a  new  habit  of  thinking  in  reference  to  the  constitution  of  our  race, 
of  a  tendency  to  look  upon  man  as  essentially  a  spiritual  creature, 
and  therefore  to  conclude  that  his  highest  and  most  important  acts 
and  exercises  must  be  of  a  spiritual  kind.  Along  with  this  faith, 
we  noticed  the  growth  of  another,  that  there  must  be  a  region  for 
those  acts  and  exercises ;  that  they  cannot  merely  turn  in  upon 
themselves,  though  that  may  be  part  of  their  occupation,  but  that 
there  must  be  a  world  adapted  to  them  and  formed  for  them.  We 
could  not  find  any  clear  account  of  this  world  except  that  it  was 
this  universe  which  surrounds  us,  and  of  which  our  eyes  and  ears 
take  account ;  but  though  this  universe  be  proclaimed  as  the  great 
possession  and  inheritance  of  mankind,  we  could  not  learn  that  more 
than  a  few  gifted  poets  and  sages  had  a  right  of  admission  to  its 
meanings  and  mysteries.  Another  difficulty  which  these  philoso- 
phers seemed  to  experience,  arose  from  the  question,  whether  a  dis- 
tinct spiritual  world  do  exist  at  all,  or  whether  it  be  only  created 
out  of  this  common  world,  by  the  class  which  is  endued  with  faculties 
for  that  purpose.  But  this  point  was  peremptorily  decided  by 
another  set  of  deep  and  earnest  thinkers,  who  seemed  to  have 
proved  the  existence  of  something  which  man  did  not  create  him- 
self, but  to  which  he  must  in  some  sort  refer  all  his  acts  and 
thoughts,  and  which  must  be  assumed  as  the  ground  of  them. 

Meanwhile  we  found  the  most  eager  and  passionate  demands 
for  a  universal  constitution  into  which  men  as  men  might  enter,  oc- 
cupying not  religious,  not  philosophical  men,  but  labourers,  handi- 
craftsmen, serfs.    The  nature  of  this  constitution  had  been  discussed 


206 


RECAPITULATION. 


again  and  again  ;  and  the  settlement  of  it  had  not  been  left  to  mere 
discussions ;  it  had  been  brought  to  the  most  severe  practical  tests. 
These  inferences  seemed  to  follow  from  them  all ;  first,  that  every 
modern  attempt  to  construct  a  universal  society  had  been  defeated 
by  the  determination  of  men  to  assert  their  own  wills ;  secondly, 
that  the  true  universal  society  must  be  one  which  neither  overlooks 
the  existence  of  those  wills,  nor  considers  them  as  an  inconvenient 
and  accidental  interruption  to  its  workings,  as  a  friction  to  be  re- 
gretted and  allowed  for,  but  which  assumes  them  as  the  very  prin- 
ciple and  explanation  of  its  existence  :  thirdly,  that  it  is  equally 
impossible  for  men  to  be  content  with  a  spiritual  society  which  is 
not  universal,  and  with  a  universal  society  which  is  not  spiritual. 
This  doctrine  then,  I  think,  cannot  be  said  to  be  obsolete,  cannot  be 
turned  into  a  mere  philosophical  notion.  Time  has  added  to  its 
strength,  not  diminished  it :  there  is  more  necessity  now  than  in 
any  former  day,  that  it  should  have  a  practical  not  a  theoretical 
satisfaction. 

III.  It  would  seem  from  these  observations,  that  the  spiritual 
and  universal  society  must  be  involved  in  the  very  idea  of  our  hu- 
man constitution,  say  rather,  must  be  that  constitution,  by  virtue  of 
which  we  realize  that  there  is  a  humanity,  that  we  form  a  kind. 
"  But  supposing  this  to  be  the  case,  may  not  we  suppose  that  this 
constitution  has  been  gradually  making  itself  known  to  men  as 
civilization  has  advanced  ;  and  that  when  it  has  been  diffused  more 
widely,  each  man  will  feel  and  understand  his  place  in  it — rightly 
and  harmoniously  exercising  those  spiritual  powers,  which  fit  him 
for  living  in  it,  and  suffering  his  neighbour  without  molestation,  nay, 
kindly  assisting  him  to  exercise  his;  that  in  this  way,  those  strifes 
and  oppositions  of  opinion,  which  have  hindered  men  from  cheer- 
fully co-operating  with  each  other,  will  gradually  cease,  and  peace 
and  good  will  become  general ;  and  may  not  one  means  to  this  end, 
be  the  abandonment  of  those  notions  which  prevailed  in  the  early 
ages  of  the  world,  and  which  have  been  kept  alive  by  the  different 
religious  sects  and  systems  since — that  the  character  of  this  consti- 
tution has  been  revealed  to  us  in  an  inspired  Book ;  and  that  it  is 
ruled  over  in  some  incredible  manner,  by  a  divine  Person  V  This 
is  the  last  hint  I  shall  consider.  It  leads  us  to  notice  another  class 
of  facts  which  have  passed  under  our  review. 


RECAPITULATION. 


207 


The  Quakers,  we  found,  were  great  disparagers  of  what  they 
called  the  outward  Letter.  They  were  jealous  lest  reverence  for 
the  Bible  should  interfere  with  the  belief  of  a  Spiritual  Invisible 
Teacher.  Nevertheless,  it  was  in  the  Bible  that  George  Fox  learnt 
clearly  the  fact  that  there  was  such  a  Teacher ;  it  was  from  the 
Bible  that  he  preached  of  it  to  others.  It  wastiot  merely  the  prin- 
ciple of  Justification  by  Faith  which  Luther,  torn  by  inward  con- 
flicts, learnt  from  the  Bible — he  owed  to  it  still  more,  the  personal 
form  of  that  doctrine,  and  the  conception  of  it  as  a  vital  truth,  not 
as  a  scholastic  dogma.  The  belief  of  Election  in  its  highest,  purest 
form,  was  received  by  Calvin  from  the  same  source;  the  Unitarian 
prized  the  Bible  as  the  great  witness  for  the  Divine  Unity,  for  God's 
absolute  and  universal  love,  for  the  fact  that  mankind  is  under  some 
better  condition  than  that  of  a  curse.  Thus,  whenever  there  has 
been  in  any  man  any  one  of  these  strong  convictions,  which  seemed 
to  us  so  precious  and  important,  then  he  has  looked  with  reverence 
upon  the  Scriptures,  as  the  teachers  of  it  and  the  authority  for  it ; 
whenever  he  has  been  able  to  carry  home  that  conviction  to  the 
minds  of  his  brethren,  these  have  been  his  instruments.  And  this 
fact  comes  out  the  more  remarkably,  when  it  is  set  by  the  side  of 
another,  which  the  study  of  the  different  religious  systems  made 
known  to  us — namely,  that  just  in  proportion  as  any  of  them  has 
become  consolidated,  the  Bible,  even  if  it  has  been  nominally  and 
formally  held  up  to  admiration,  nay  even  to  worship,  has  been  de- 
posed from  its  real  dignity.  The  Quaker,  who  converts  it  into  a 
system  of  conceits  and  allegories,  under  pretence  of  doing  reverence 
to  the  Spirit,  has  not  really  treated  it  worse  than  the  Lutheran,  or 
the  Calvinist,  who  cuts  it  up  into  texts  for  the  confirmation  of 
dogmas,  or  the  mottos  of  sermons,  or  than  the  Unitarian,  who  would 
reduce  it  into  a  collection  of  moral  maxims.  So  that,  instead  of 
being  obliged  by  our  belief  of  the  instability  and  helplessness  of 
these  systems,  to  suspect  the  value,  or  underrate  the  authority  of 
the  book  to  which  they  all  appeal ;  may  we  not  say  boldly,  that  as 
it  was  this  book  which  revealed  to  each  founder  of  a  sect,  that  side 
or  aspect  of  the  spiritual  economy,  which  it  was  his  especial  voca- 
tion to  present  and  elucidate,  so  it  has  been  a  perpetual  and  most 
embarrassing  witness  against  the  effort  to  compress  that  economy 


208 


RECAPITULATION. 


within  the  rules  and  formulas,  which  he  and  his  followers  have 
devised  for  the  statement  of  their  opinions  ? 

But  this  is  not  enough.  It  is  alleged,  that  whatever  may  have 
been  the  case  with  religious  bodies,  the  greatest  light  has,  of  late 
especially,  been  thrown  upon  the  nature  of  our  spiritual  constitution, 
by  those  who  did  rfbt  derive  their  knowledge  from  the  Scriptures ; 
nay,  who  had  great  doubts  about  their  value  and  authenticity. 

Now,  I  have  not  affected  to  disparage  the  labours  of  philoso- 
phers, either  in  these  or  in  past  days.  I  have  expressed  the  highest 
respect  for  those  who  have  brought  to  light  what  seem  to  me  pre- 
cious truths  respecting  certain  faculties  in  us,  which  had  been  sup- 
posed to  have  no  existence.  But  I  have  also  intimated  an  opinion, 
which  I  am  most  anxious  should  be  sifted,  and  if  it  be  false, 
exposed,  that  this  is  precisely  the  limit  of  their  doings.  They  have 
proved  that  we  have  certain  faculties  which  do  take  cognizance  of 
spiritual  transcendental  objects :  they  have  not  shown  what  these 
spiritual  transcendent  objects  are ;  they  have  shown  that  we  must 
have  a  spiritual  constitution  ;  they  have  not  shown  what  that  spi- 
ritual constitution  is.  I  do  not  therefore  deny  that  we  have  learnt 
what  our  forefathers  did  not  know,  or  did  not  know  nearly  as  well. 
I  do  not  deny  that  it  has  been  the  effect  of  experiments,  failures, 
contradictions,  to  make  us  better  acquainted  with  what  we  are  and 
what  we  want.  I  am  very  thankful,  for  the  sake  of  mankind,  that 
there  have  been  men  who  were  permitted  to  make  these  discoveries, 
without  (obviously,  and  so  far  as  we  know,  I  mean)  seeing  the 
truths  which  I  think  answer  to  them,  and  which  show  that  Tantalus 
is  not  the  one  type  of  humanity.  But  so  far  from  being  led  by 
any  thing  that  I  see  or  hear  of  these  writers,  to  believe  that  they 
have  discovered  any  substitute  for  a  Revelation  of  that  which  is 
needful  for  man's  highest  necessities,  I  am  well  convinced  that  their 
teachings  honestly  received  will  make  his  cries  for  one  more  pas- 
sionate; and  that  it  will  be  seen  at  last,  that  the  book  which  has 
always  hitherto  met  the  cravings  of  its  readers,  and  given  them 
that  glimpse  of  the  mysterious  world  which  they  required,  does 
contain  the  full  declaration  of  that  state  which  God  has  established 
for  us,  and  which  we  have  been  toiling  all  our  lives  to  find. 

The  second  part  of  the  question  is  very  much  involved  with  the 


RECAPITULATION.  209 

first,  and  for  our  purpose  is  perhaps  the  most  important.  "  Is  not 
the  idea  of  a  spiritual  King,  an  actual  Person,  superintending  and 
ordaining  the  movements  of  the  universal  and  spiritual  society,  the 
dream  of  a  past  age — is  it  not  one  which  a  sensible  man,  who  was 
also  an  honest  one,  and  used  words  in  their  simple  straightforward 
sense,  would  be  rather  reluctant  than  anxious  to  bring  forward  1  Is 
it  not  obvious,  that  every  step  in  the  progress  of  thought  and  dis- 
covery has  taken  us  further  from  such  a  notion  as  this,  and  has  be- 
queathed it,  as  their  proper  possession,  to  old  wives  and  children  f 
I  have  perhaps  implicitly  treated  this  point  already ;  still,  I  am  so 
anxious  to  give  it  a  direct  consideration,  that  I  will,  at  any  hazard 
of  repetition  and  tediousness,  recur  to  my  former  method  of  proof. 

A  belief  in  a  direct  spiritual  government  over  the  life,  thoughts, 
acts,  and  words,  of  those  who  would  submit  themselves  to  it,  was, 
we  have  seen,  the  third  distinguishing  peculiarity  of  Quakerism  ; 
the  one  which  produced  so  many  more  outward  and  apparent  results 
than  the  other  two,  that  in  the  notions  of  modern  Friends  it  has 
absorbed  them  both  into  itself.  The  system  of  the  society  appears 
to  be  expressly  devised  for  the  purpose  of  giving  expression  to  this 
belief.  Did  it  then  seem  to  us  that  this  system  was  falling  into 
decay,  because  it  had  borne  too  decisive  and  consistent  a  witness  to 
this  bygone  notion,  or  had  prevented  it  from  undergoing  those 
changes  to  which,  with  the  increase  of  light  and  civilization,  it 
ought  to  have  been  subject  ?  On  the  contrary,  the  essential  feeble- 
ness of  Quakerism  appeared  to  lie  in  this — that  it  exhibited  the 
doctrine  of  spiritual  superintendence  in  an  inadequate,  inconsistent, 
and  shrivelled  form.  It  testified  that  sudden  thoughts,  sudden  acts, 
sudden  speeches,  oftentimes  of  the  most  obviously  trifling  character, 
had  their  origin  in  divine  teaching  and  inspiration  ;  it  virtually  ex- 
cluded what  is  the  most  significant,  and  what  Quakers,  like  all 
other  persons,  are  obliged  to  acknowledge  as  the  most  significant 
portion  of  our  life — that  which  is  occupied  with  calm,  orderly,  con- 
tinuous transactions — from  the  spiritual  sphere.  Education,  we 
saw  that  the  Quakers  looked  upon  as  most  important;  education 
according  to  the  system  of  the  society  could  not  be  a  spiritual  work. 

If  we  turned  from  Quakerism  to  that  which  is  most  unlike  it,  to 
Calvinism,  the  same  inference  was  forced  upon  us  in  another  form. 
— A  belief  in  the  will  of  God  as  the  only  spring  of  Good,  Order, 

14 


210 


RECAPITULATION. 


Happiness,  was,  we  found,  the  earnest  practical  life-giving  principle 
in  the  minds  of  Calvin  and  his  disciples ;  whatever  brave  acts  they 
had  done,  whatever  good  thoughts  they  had  uttered,  sprang  from 
this  conviction.  Had  they  pushed  it  too  far — had  their  system  riv- 
eted the  notion  of  a  ruling  Will  in  their  minds,  and  so  perpetuated 
it  to  an  age,  when,  in  the  natural  course  of  things,  it  ought  to  have 
been  abandoned?  We  were  led  to  adopt  exactly  the  opposite  opin- 
ion. Their  system,  by  setting  aside  the  idea  of  a  human  will,  had 
left  the  doctrine  of  a  Divine  will  barren  and  unmeaning ;  the  idea 
of  a  personal  Ruler  had  disappeared,  and  those  who  were  most 
anxious  to  assert  the  government  of  the  living  God,  had  been  the 
great  instruments  of  propagating  the  notion  of  an  atheistical  Ne- 
cessity. 

But  it  may  be  said,  ?  Though  these  Quaker,  and  these  Calvin- 
istical  opinions,  concerning  the  Spirit  which  works  in  man,  and  the 
absolute  Will  of  God,  may  involve  or  be  involved  in  that  idea  of 
an  actual  King  of  men  to  which  we  are  alluding — they  are  not 
identical  with  it.  That  idea  evidently  turns  upon  the  doctrine  of 
an  Incarnation ;  it  asserts  that  one  who  is  the  Son  of  Man,  as  well 
as  the  Son  of  God,  is  the  Lord  of  the  world,  and,  in  some  higher 
sense,  of  the  spiritual  Society— and  it  is  this  doctrine  which  seems 
so  connected  with  the  oldest  fables  of  the  world,  that  we  cannot 
but  think  it  must  give  way  before  the  light  of  truth.'  So  the  Uni- 
tarian of  the  last  century  thought,  and  the  question  we  discussed 
was — How  did  this  opinion,  which  was  the  root  of  their  system, 
affect  these  principles  which  really  formed  the  faith  of  the  better 
men  among  them  1 

It  seemed  to  us,  that  the  idea  of  the  unity  of  God  was  sacri- 
ficed, because  the  person  who  was  acknowledged  as  the  great  ob- 
ject and  centre  of  human  admiration,  was  denied  to  be  one  with 
the  Father ;  that  the  idea  of  the  love  of  God  was  sacrificed,  because 
it  was  denied  that  he  had  in  his  own  Person  interfered  on  behalf  of 
his  creatures ;  that  the  idea  of  our  being  children  of  God  was  sac- 
rificed, because  there  was  nothing  to  give  the  name  of  Father  re- 
ality ;  to  show  that  it  was  more  than  a  loose  and  almost  blasphe- 
mous figure  of  speech. 

Accordingly,  in  the  new  Unitarianism,  Jesus  of  Nazareth  is 
beginning  to  be  recognised  as  merely  one  of  the  world's  heroes ; 


RECAPITULATION. 


211 


it  may  or  may  not  be  the  most  important  and  conspicuous  one. 
But  this  belief,  this  last  and  highest  discovery  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  takes  us  back  to  that  stage  of  history,  in  which  universal 
fellowship  was  impossible ;  to  the  time  when  there  was  a  Grecian 
Hercules  and  an  Egyptian  Hercules ;  when  he  who  repealed  bad 
laws  was  the  hero  of  a  country,  and  he  who  drained  a  marsh  of  a 
neighbourhood ;  and  when  men  were  crying  and  sighing  for  some 
one  who  should  be  the  head  and  prince  of  all  these ;  who  should 
be  indeed  the  Lord  of  their  race ;  who  should  rescue  the  race  from 
the  evils  to  which,  as  a  race,  it  was  subject ;  who  should  connect 
it  with  the  absolute  Being  of  whom  their  consciences  witnessed. 
Is  not  this  a  strange  and  melancholy  relapse  under  the  name  of 
progression ! 

We  have  then  a  reasonable  excuse  for  inquiring,  whether  there 
be  on  this  earth  a  spiritual  and  universal  kingdom,  which  the  differ- 
ent religious  systems  have  not  been  able  to  supersede  or  destroy ; 
which  is  likely  to  make  itself  manifest  when  they  have  all  perish- 
ed ;  and  with  which  we  of  the  nineteenth  century  may  have  fel- 
lowship. 

And  as  a  preface  to  this  inquiry,  it  seems  not  unfitting  to  con- 
sider whether  there  be  any  traces  of  a  spiritual  constitution  in  the 
early  ages  of  the  world,  and  whether  the  books  of  Scripture  afford 
us  any  help  in  interpreting  them. 


CHAPTER  II. 

INDICATIONS  OF  A  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION. 

When  I  was  speaking  of  the  Quaker  system,  I  noticed  one 
practical  inconsistency  which  seemed  to  lie  at  the  root  of  it,  and 
to  affect  all  its  workings.  The  member  of  the  Society  of  Friends 
ought  to  be  the  conscious  disciple  of  a  Divine  Teacher.  But  every 
child  born  to  a  Quaker  is  actually  considered  and  treated  as  a  Friend, 
till,  by  some  act  of  rebellion,  he  has  deprived  himself  of  the  title. 
Something  of  the  same  anomaly  we  have  traced  in  the  Protestant 
systems ;  consciously  justified  men  ought  to  constitute  the  Evan- 
gelical Church ;  persons  conscious  of  a  divine  Election — the  re- 
formed. Yet,  neither  of  these  have  had  the  courage  to  exclude 
their  children  from  all  religious  fellowship,  to  treat  them  absolutely 
as  heathens.  The  Anabaptists  have  made  the  nearest  approach  to 
that  practice ;  but  even  in  them  there  are  very  evident  indications 
of  timidity  and  inconsistency. 

When  we  examined  the  schemes  of  the  world  which  had  been 
constructed  by  philosophers,  we  observed  that  they  had  been  en- 
countered by  a  knot,  not  unlike  that  which  had  perplexed  the  au- 
thors of  religious  sects,  and  that  they  had  found  themselves  com- 
pelled with  more  or  less  of  ceremony  to  cut  it.  It  was  next  to 
impossible  to  organize  a  universal  society,  while  the  distinction  of 
families  prevailed.  In  such  a  society  men  must  be  so  many  sepa- 
rate units.  But  there  is  this  glaring  fact  to  prove  that  they  are  not 
units ;  that  they  are  bound  together  by  a  certain  law,  which  may 
be  set  at  naught,  and  made  almost  utterly  inefficient,  but  which 
cannot  be  entirely  repealed. 

L  Now  this  fact,  that  men  exist  in  families,  which  seems  so 
grievously  to  disturb  the  inventors  of  systems,  is  perhaps  the  very 
one  which  would  be  most  likely  to  suggest  the  thought  to  a  plain 
person,  that  there  must  be  a  moral  or  spiritual  constitution  for  man- 
kind.   We  are  obliged  to  speak  of  every  man  as  being  in  two  con- 


INDICATIONS  OF  A  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION. 


213 


ditions.  He  is  in  a  world  of  objects  which  offer  themselves  to  his 
senses,  and  which  his  senses  may  be  fitted  to  entertain.  He  is  a 
son,  perhaps  he  is  a  brother.  These  two  states  are  equally  inevita- 
ble ;  they  are  also  perfectly  distinct.  You  cannot  by  any  artifice 
reduce  them  under  the  same  law  or  name.  To  describe  the  one, 
you  must  speak  of  what  we  see,  or  hear,  or  handle,  or  smell ;  to 
describe  the  other,  you  must  speak  of  what  we  are;  "I  am  a  son," 
"  I  am  a  brother."  It  is  impossible  therefore  to  use  the  word  "  cir- 
cumstances" in  reference  to  the  one  state  with  the  same  strictness 
with  which  you  apply  it  to  the  other.  All  the  things  which  I  have  to 
do  with,  I  naturally  and  rightly  call,  my  circumstances — they  stand 
round  me :  but  that  which  is  necessary  in  an  account  of  myself, 
seems  to  be  entitled  to  another  name.  We  commonly  call  it  a  re- 
lationship.  And  this  difference  soon  becomes  more  conspicuous. 
We  speak  of  a  man  having  a  bad  digestion  or  a  bad  hearing  ;  we 
speak  of  his  being  a  bad  brother  or  a  bad  son.  By  both  these 
phrases  we  imply  that  there  is  a  want  of  harmony  between  the 
man  and  his  condition.  But  by  the  one  we  evidently  wish  to  sig- 
nify that  there  need  not  be  this  want  of  harmony,  that  he  is  volun- 
tarily acting  as  if  he  were  not  in  a  relation  in  which  nevertheless 
he  is,  and  must  remain.  This  inconsistency  we  describe  by  the 
term  moral  evil,  or  whatever  equivalent  phrase  we  may  have  in- 
vented ;  for  some  equivalent,  whether  we  like  it  or  not,  we  must 
have. 

It  might  seem  to  follow  from  these  observations,  that  the  family 
state  is  the  natural  one  for  man  ;  and  accordingly  we  speak  of  the 
affections  which  correspond  to  this  state,  as  especially  natural  affec- 
tions. But  it  should  be  remembered  that  we  use  another  phrase 
which  is  apparently  inconsistent  with  this ;  we  describe  the  savage 
condition,  that  is  to  say,  the  one  in  which  man  is  striving  to  be 
independent,  as  the  natural  state  of  society.  And  though  it  may 
be  doubtful  whether  that  should  be  called  a  state  of  society,  which 
is  the  contradiction  of  all  states  and  of  all  society,  yet  there  seems 
a  very  considerable  justification  for  the  application  of  the  word 
natural  to  it ;  seeing  that  we  cannot  be  acquainted  with  a  family, 
or  be  members  of  a  family,  without  knowing  in  others — without 
feeling  in  ourselves,  certain  inclinations  which  tend  to  the  dissolu- 
tion of  its  bonds,  and  to  the  setting  up  of  that  separate  independent 


214 


INDICATIONS  OF 


life,  which  when  exhibited  on  a  large  scale  we  name  the  savage 
or  wild  life.  These  inclinations  are  kept  down  by  discipline,  and 
the  affections  which  attract  us  to  the  members  of  our  family  are 
called  out  in  opposition  to  them ;  surely,  therefore,  it  cannot  be  a 
mistake  to  describe  them  by  the  name  which  we  ordinarily  apply 
to  plants  that  spring  up  in  a  soil,  uncultivated  and  uncalled  for. 

We  have  here  some  of  the  indications  of  a  spiritual  constitu- 
tion; that  is  to  say,  we  have  the  marks  of  a  state  which  is  designed 
for  a  voluntary  creature ;  which  is  his,  whether  he  approve  it  or 
no  ;  against  which,  he  has  a  nature  or  inclination  to  rebel.  But 
still,  most  persons  would  mean  something  more  by  the  phrase  than 
this ;  they  would  ask  how  you  could  call  that  spiritual,  which  had 
no  reference  to  religion.  Now  the  histories  and  mythologies  of  all 
the  people  with  whom  we  are  acquainted  bear  unequivocal  witness 
to  this  fact,  that  men  have  connected  the  ideas  of  fathers,  children, 
husbands,  brothers,  sisters,  with  the  beings  whom  they  worshipped. 
This  is  the  first,  rudest  observation  which  we  make  upon  them. 
But,  when  we  search  further,  we  begin  to  see  that  this  simple 
observation  has  the  most  intimate  connection  with  the  whole  of 
mythology  ;  that  it  is  not  merely  a  fact  in  reference  to  it,  but  the 
fact,  without  which  all  others  which  encounter  us  are  unintelligible. 
You  say  all  kinds  of  offices  are  attributed  to  the  gods  and  god- 
desses ;  they  rule  over  this  town  and  that  river,  they  dispense  this 
blessing  or  send  that  curse.  Be  it  so ;  but  who  are  they  who  ex- 
ercise these  powers  ?  The  mythology  tells  you  of  relations  exist- 
ing between  them;  also  of  relations  between  them  and  the  objects  of 
their  bounty  and  their  enmity.  In  later  ages,  when  we  are  studying 
the  differences  in  the  mythology  of  different  nations,  it  is  no  won- 
der that  we  should  notice  the  character  of  the  soil,  the  nature  of 
the  climate,  the  beauty  or  the  dreariness  of  the  country,  the  rains 
or  the  inundations  which  watered  it,  as  circumstances  helping  to 
determine  the  views  which  the  inhabitants  entertained  of  their 
unseen  rulers.  And  then  the  transition  is  very  easy  to  the  belief, 
that  by  these  observations  we  have  accounted  for  their  faith,  and 
that  the  histories  of  the  gods  are  merely  accidental  poetical  embel- 
lishments. But,  if  we  consider  that  the  worshippers  evidently  felt 
that  which  we  call  accidental  to  be  essential ;  that  the  merging 
the  gods  in  the  objects  with  which  they  were  connected  was  merely 


A  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION.  215 

an  artifice  of  later  philosophy;  that  the  circumstances  of  soil  and 
climate  did  indeed  occasion  some  important  differences  between 
the  objects  reverenced  in  various  nations,  but  that  the  circumstance 
of  their  being  parents,  brothers,  and  sisters,  so  far  as  we  know, 
wns  common  to  all,  or  only  wanting  in  those  which  were  utterly 
savage,  that  is,  in  which  the  human  relations  were  disregarded  :  if 
we  observe  that  those  who  endeavour  to  explain  mythology  by  the 
phenomena  of  the  world,  are  obliged  to  beg  what  they  call  "  a  law 
of  nature,"  alleging  that  we  are  naturally  inclined  to  inquire  into 
the  origin  of  any  great  and  remarkable  objects  which  we  see  ;  if 
we  will  notice  how  utterly  inconsistent  it  is  with  all  experience 
and  observation  to  attribute  such  a  disposition  as  this  to  men, 
whose  feelings  and  faculties  have  not  been  by  some  means  pre- 
viously awakened — how  very  little  a  savage  is  struck  by  any,  ex- 
cept the  most  glaring  and  alarming  phenomena,  and  how  much 
less  he  thinks  about  them  :  if  we  will  reflect  upon  these  points,  we 
may  perhaps  be  led  to  adopt  the  opinion  that  the  simplest  method 
of  solving  the  difficulty  is  the  best ;  that  it  is  not  our  being  sur- 
rounded with  a  strange  world  of  sensible  objects  which  leads  us  to 
think  of  objects  with  which  we  do  not  sensibly  converse,  but  that 
these  perceptions  come  to  us  through  our  family  relationships ;  that 
we  become  more  and  more  merely  idolaters  when  these  relation- 
ships are  lost  sight  of,  and  the  other  facts  of  our  condition  only 
regarded  ;  that  a  world  without  family  relationships  would  have 
no  worship,  and  on  the  other  hand,  that  without  worship  all  the 
feelings  and  affections  of  family  life  would  have  utterly  perished. 

II.  But  is  there  no  meaning  in  that  savage  wish  for  indepen- 
dence ?  is  it  merely  the  dissolution  and  destruction  of  those  family 
bonds  which  are  meant  for  men,  or  is  it  the  indication  that  he  was 
meant  for  other  bonds  than  these,  not  perhaps  of  necessity  incom- 
patible with  them  ?  History  seems  to  decide  the  question  in  favour 
of  the  latter  opinion.  It  seems  to  say,  that  as  there  is  a  worse  state 
of  society  than  the  patriarchal,  there  is  also  a  better  and  more 
advanced  one  ;  it  declares  that  the  faculties  which  are  given  to  man 
never  have  had  their  proper  development  and  expansion,  except 
in  a  national  community.  Now  if  we  examine  any  one  of  these, 
taking  our  specimen  from  the  Pagan  world,  we  shall  perceive  that 
the  member  of  it  had  a  more  distinct  feeline  of  himself,  of  his  own 


216 


INDICATIONS  OF 


personality,  than  the  mere  dweller  in  a  family  could  have.  It  may 
seem  to  us  very  puzzling  that  it  should  be  so  ;  for  if  we  look  at 
Sparta  or  Rome — at  any  commonwealth  except  Athens — it  seems 
as  if  the  society  were  imposing  the  severest  restraints  upon  each 
man's  own  taste,  judgment,  and  will.  Nevertheless,  it  is  the  mani- 
festation of  energetic  purpose  in  particular  leaders,  and  the  assur- 
ance we  feel  that  there  was  the  same  kind  of  purpose,  though  in  a 
less  degree,  existing  in  those  who  composed  every  rank  of  their 
armies,  which  gives  the  interest  to  the  better  times  of  these  repub- 
lics ;  as  it  is  the  feeling  of  a  change  in  this  respect — of  the  armies 
having  become  a  body  of  soldiers  merely,  not  of  men,  which  makes 
the  declining  ages  of  them  so  mournful.  We  have  evidence,  there- 
fore, coming  in  a  way  in  which  it  might  least  be  expected,  that  this 
personal  feeling  is  connected  with  the  sense  of  national  union. 

Of  all  men,  the  savage*  has  least  of  the  feelings  of  dignity 
and  personal  self-respect ;  he  is  most  emphatically  a  mere  work- 
man or  tool,  the  habitual  slave  of  his  own  chance  necessities  and 
inclinations,  and  therefore  commonly  of  other  men's  also.  He 
who  understands  the  force  of  the  words,  "I  am  a  brother,"  has 
taken  a  mighty  step  in  advance  of  this  individual  man,  even  in 
that  respect  on  which  he  most  prides  himself ;  he  is  more  of  a 
person,  more  of  a  freeman.  But  he  is  not  enough  of  a  person, 
not  enough  of  a  freeman.  If  he  will  be  more,  he  must  be  able  to 
say,  "  I  am  a  citizen  this  is  the  true  onward  step  ;  if  he  aim  at 
freedom  by  any  other,  he  relapses  into  an  independence  which  is 
only  another  name  for  slavery.  Now,  we  may  observe  several 
facts,  too  obvious  to  escape  the  most  careless  student  of  history, 
except  it  should  be  from  their  very  obviousness,  which  are  closely 
connected  with  this.  One  is,  than  in  every  organized  nation  at  its 
commencement,  there  is  a  high  respect  for  family  relations,  that 
they  embody  themselves  necessarily  in  the  national  constitution  ; 

*  Of  course  there  is  no  ideal  savage  in  actual  existence — no  one  who  is  perfectly 
independent.  The  North  American  Indian  has  so  many  tribe  feelings,  that  the  admirers 
of  savage  life,  taking  him  for  an  example,  have  been  able  to  contend  that  it  is  the  very 
soil  for  the  cultivation  of  domestic  affections.  But  not  to  dwell  upon  the  violent  exag- 
gerations and  distortions  of  fact  which  have  been  necessary  for  the  support  of  this 
hypothesis,  it  is  quite  obvious  that  these  feelings  and  affections  are  just  so  many  depart- 
ures from  savage  perfection — so  many  threatenings  of  a  degeneracy  into  the  social  and 
civiliz-  d  condition.  The  true  savage  is  Caliban  ;  the  nearest  approximation  to  him  is 
probably  to  be  looked  for  in  New  Holland. 


A  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION. 


217 


another  is,  that  there  is  a  struggle  between  these  relations  and  the 
national  polity,  although  they  form  so  great  an  element  in  it ;  the 
legislator,  feeling  that  each  brother,  husband,  father,  is  a  citizen, 
and  that  as  such,  he  comes  directly  under  his  cognizance. 

In  Sparta,  we  see  the  principle  of  family  life,  though  distinctly 
recognised,  sacrificed  in  a  great  degree  to  the  Laws.  In  Athens, 
we  see  the  legislator  in  his  anxiety  to  leave  men  to  themselves, 
allowing  the  growth  of  an  independence  which  proved  incompatible 
both  with  family  relations  and  with  national  society.  In  Rome,  we 
see  the  legislation  so  exquisitely  interwoven  with  the  family 
principle,  that  so  soon  as  that  became  weak,  the  commonwealth 
inevitably  fell. 

These  facts  lead  us  to  ask  what  this  legislation  means,  wherein 
its  power  lies,  and  in  what  way  it  comes  to  be  so  connected  with, 
and  yet  diverse  from,  these  relationships  1  In  trying  to  find  the 
answer  to  this  question  we  are  at  once  struck  with  this  observation 
— Law  takes  each  man  apart  from  his  fellows ;  it  addresses  him 
with  a  Thou;  it  makes  him  feel  that  there  is  an  eye  fixed  upon  his 
doings  ;  that  there  is  a  penalty  overhanging  him.  It  is  therefore, 
in  this  point  of  view,  the  direct  opposite  of  a  relationship  by  which 
we  are  bound  to  each  other,  and  are  made  to  feel  that  we  cannot 
exist  apart  from  each  other.  But,  again,  we  find  that  the  Law 
denounces  those  acts  which  make  union  and  fellowship  impossible 
— those  acts  which  result  from  the  determination  of  men  to  live 
and  act  as  if  they  were  independent  of  each  other,  as  if  they  might 
set  up  themselves  and  make  self-pleasing  their  end.  The  law 
declares  to  each  man  that  he  is  in  a  fellowship,  that  he  shall  not 
do  any  act  which  is  inconsistent  with  that  position.  That  therefore 
which  is  the  great  foe  to  family  relationship,  the  desire  for  individual- 
ity, is  the  very  thing  which  Law,  even  while  it  deals  with  men  as 
distinct  persons,  is  threatening  and  cursing.  A  nation  then,  like 
a  family,  would  seem  to  possess  some  of  the  characteristics  of  a 
spiritual  constitution.  If  we  take  the  word  spiritual  in  that  sense 
in  which  it  is  used  by  modern  philosophers,  we  have  abundant  proofs 
that  where  there  is  no  feeling  of  national  union,  there  is  a  most 
precarious  and  imperfect  exercise  of  intellectual  power.  If  we 
take  it  in  the  sense  of  voluntary,  we  find  here  a  constitution,  evi- 
dently meant  for  creatures  which  have  wills ;  seeing  that  it  is  one 


218 


INDICATIONS  OF 


which  men  do  not  create  for  themselves,  that  it  is  one  which  may 
be  violated,  nay,  which  there  is  a  natural  inclination  in  every  man 
to  violate  ;  and  that  by  the  words  "  bad  citizen,"  we  express  moral 
reprobation,  just  as  we  do  when  we  speak  of  a  bad  father  or 
mother.  And  if  we  ask  whether  there  are  any  religious  feelings 
connected  with  national  life,  as  we  found  there  were  with  family 
life — the  mythology  of  the  old  world  is  just  as  decisive  in  its  reply. 
If  the  Homeric  gods  were  fathers,  brothers,  husbands,  they  were 
also  kings  ;  one  character  is  just  as  prominent,  just  as  essential  as 
the  other.  It  is  possible  that  the  former  may  have  been  the  most 
ancient,  and  this  would  explain  the  notion  of  scholars  that  traces 
of  an  earlier  worship  are  discoverable  in  the  Iliad.  In  Homer's 
time  they  were  incorporated,  and  the  offices  of  the  gods  as  con- 
nected with  nature,  though  they  might  be  gradually  mingling 
themselves  with  these  characters,  and  threatening  to  become  iden- 
tical with  them,  are  nevertheless  distinct  from  them.  The  princes 
of  Agamemnon's  league  felt  that  there  must  be  higher  princes  than 
they ;  they  could  use  no  authority,  take  no  counsel,  except  in  that 
belief.  And  though  they  spoke  of  these  rulers  as  compelling  the 
clouds  and  winds,  they  did  not  look  upon  this  exercise  of  power  as 
higher  or  more  real,  than  that  of  putting  wTisdom  and  spirit  into 
Diomed,  and  arming  Hector  for  the  fight.  And  hence  the  leaders 
were  always  types  of  the  gods  in  every  country  which  had  attained 
the  forms  of  a  national  polity.  Wherever  these  existed,  invisible 
rulers  were  recognised  ;  a  class  of  men  interpreted  the  meaning 
of  their  judgments ;  they  were  invoked  as  the  guides  in  battles ; 
sacrifices  were  offered  to  avert  their  displeasure  or  to  claim  their 
protection. 

But,  a  time  came,  when  thoughts  were  awakened  in  men's 
minds  of  something  more  comprehensive  than  either  this  family  or 
this  national  constitution.  The  former  belonged  to  all  men  ;  yet, 
in  another  respect  it  was  narrow,  separating  men  from  each  other. 
The  latter  was  obviously  exclusive  ;  a  nation  was  limited  to  a  small 
locality  ;  it  actually  treated  all  that  lay  beyond  it,  and  whom  it 
could  not  subdue  to  itself,  as  aliens,  if  not  enemies.  If  this  ex- 
clusion were  to  continue,  there  was  certainly  some  nation  which 
ought  to  reign,  which  had  a  right  to  make  its  polity  universal. 
Great  Asiatic  monarchies  there  had  been,  which  had  swallowed  all 


A  SPIRITUAL  CONSTITUTION. 


219 


tribes  and  kingdoms  into  themselves,  but  these  had  established  a 
rule  of  mere  physical  force. 

Might  not  Greece,  the  land  of  intellectual  force,  show  that  it 
was  meant  to  rule  over  all  ?  The  young  hero  of  Macedon  went 
forth  in  this  hope,  and  in  a  few  years  accomplished  his  dream.  In 
a  few  more  his  empire  was  broken  in  pieces  ;  Greece  was  not  to 
be  the  lord  of  world  :  still  in  the  Egyptian  and  Syrian  dynasties 
which  she  sent  forth,  she  asserted  a  mental  supremacy.  But  a 
nation,  which  paid  no  homage  to  art  or  to  philosophy,  swallowed 
up  all  these  dynasties,  and  with  them  all  that  remained  of  Greece 
herself.  A  universal  polity  was  established  in  the  wrorld,  and  the 
national  life,  the  family  life  of  Rome,  perished  at  the  very  moment 
in  which  she  established  it. 

Was  there  a  religion  connected  with  this  universal  polity  as 
there  was  with  the  family  and  the  national  ?  We  find  that  there 
was.  The  Emperor  was  the  great  God.  To  him  all  people  and 
nations  and  languages  were  to  bow.  Subject  to  this  supreme 
divinity  all  others  might  be  tolerated  and  recognised.  No  form  of 
religion  was  to  be  proscribed  unless  it  were  absolutely  incompatible 
with  the  worship  of  a  Tiberius  and  a  Vitellius.  It  has  been  sug- 
gested already,  that  this  Roman  Empire  answers  exactly  to  the 
idea  of  an  universal  world.  If  there  is  to  be  any  thing  different 
from  this — if  there  is  to  be  an  universal  Church,  we  ought  to  know 
of  what  elements  it  is  to  be  composed,  we  ought  to  know  whether 
it  also  sets  aside  family  or  national  life,  or  whether  it  justifies  their 
existence,  reconciles  them  to  itself,  and  interprets  the  problems  of 
ancient  history  concerning  their  mysterious  meaning. 


CHAPTER  III. 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW  OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 

It  is  commonly  acknowledged  by  religious  persons,  that  the 
Bible  is  remarkably  unsystematic.  Sometimes  this  admission  is 
made  thankfully  and  even  triumphantly ;  it  is  urged  as  a  proof, 
that  the  Bible  is  mainly  intended  to  supply  the  daily  wants  and  to 
meet  the  ever-changing  circumstances  of  the  spiritual  man.  Some- 
times it  furnishes  the  ground  of  an  argument  for  the  necessity  of 
that  being  done  by  others  which  is  not  done  here — by  those  who 
lived  nearest  the  age  of  the  Apostles,  or  at  the  Reformation,  or 
in  a  more  advanced  period  of  civilization.  Sometimes  it  is  alleged 
as  a  reason  for  denying  that  there  is  any  book  possessing  the  char- 
acter which  Christians  have  attributed  to  this  one — for  asserting 
that  it  is  a  collection  of  documents,  belonging  to  a  particular  na- 
tion, accidentally  strung  together,  and  invested  by  the  superstition  of 
after-times  with  a  fictitious  entireness. 

All  these  notions,  it  seems  to  me,  assume  that  the  words  system 
and  method  are  synonymous,  and  that  if  the  first  is  wanting  in  the 
Scriptures  the  last  must  be  wanting  also.  Now  to  me  these 
words  seem  not  only  not  synonymous,  but  the  greatest  contraries 
imaginable — the  one  indicating  that  which  is  most  opposed  to  life, 
freedom,  variety ;  and  the  other  that  without  which  they  cannot 
exist.  If  I  wished  to  explain  my  meaning,  I  should  not  resort  to 
a  definition ;  I  should  take  an  illustration,  and,  of  all  illustrations, 
I  think  the  most  striking  is  that  which  is  afforded  by  the  Bible  it- 
self. While  the  systematizer  is  tormented,  every  page  he  reads, 
with  a  sense  of  the  refractory  and  hopeless  materials  he  has  to  deal 
with,  I  am  convinced,  that  the  person  who  is  determined  to  read 
only  for  his  own  comfort  and  profit,  is  haunted  with  the  sense  of 
some  harmony,  not  in  the  words  but  in  the  history,  which  he  ought 
not  to  overlook,  and  without  reference  to  which  the  meaning  of 
that  in  which  he  most  delights  is  not  very  certain.    And,  while 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW,  ETC. 


221 


this  sense  of  a  method  exists,  the  fact,  that  these  works  were  writ- 
ten at  different  periods,  in  different  styles,  and  by  men  of  to- 
tally different  characters,  increases  the  impression  that  there  is 
something  most  marvellous  in  the  volume  they  compose.  The 
most  skilful,  laborious  analyst  cannot  persuade  his  disciples  to 
abandon  the  use  of  the  word  Bible — he  cannot  divest  himself  of 
the  feelings  with  which  it  is  associated. 

I.  Perhaps  it  may  be  useful  for  the  purpose  at  which  we  are 
aiming,  that  we  should  examine  a  little  into  this  phenomenon. 
Every  one  who  reads  the  Old  Testament,  must  perceive  that  the 
idea  of  a  covenant  of  God  with  a  certain  people,  is  that  which 
presides  in  it.  In  plain  history,  in  lofty  prayers  and  songs,  in  im- 
passioned denunciations  of  existing  evil,  and  predictions  of  com- 
ing misery — this  idea  is  still  at  the  root  of  all  others.  Take  it 
away,  and  not  merely  is  there  no  connection  between  the  different 
parts,  but  each  book  by  itself,  however  simple  in  its  language  or 
in  its  details,  becomes  an  incoherent  rhapsody.  A  person  then, 
who  had  no  higher  wish  than  to  understand  the  character  and 
feelings  of  that  strange  people  which  has  preserved  its  identity 
through  so  many  generations,  would  of  course  begin  with  examin- 
ing into  the  account  of  this  covenant.  He  would  feel  that  the  call 
of  Abraham,  the  promise  made  to  him  and  to  his  seed,  and  the  seal 
of  it  which  was  given  him,  were  most  significant  parts  of  this  re- 
cord. But  one  thought  would  strike  him  above  all — This  covenant 
is  said  to  be  with  a  family :  with  a  man  doubtless  in  the  first  in- 
stance— but  with  a  man  expressly  and  emphatically  as  the  head 
of  a  family.  The  very  terms  of  the  covenant,  and  every  promise 
that  it  held  forth,  was  inseparably  associated  with  the  hope  of  a 
posterity.  It  is  impossible  to  look  upon  the  patriarchal  character 
of  Abraham,  as  something  accidental  to  his  character  as  the  chosen 
witness  and  servant  of  the  Most  High.  These  two  positions  are 
absolutely  inseparable.  The  fact  of  his  relationship  to  God  is  in- 
terpreted to  him  by  the  feeling  of  his  human  relations,  and  his  ca- 
pacity of  fulfilling  them  arose  from  his  acknowledgment  of  the 
higher  relation.  A  little  further  reflection  upon  the  subordinate 
parts  of  the  narrative  (which,  when  this  fact  is  felt  to  be  the  cen- 
tre, will  all  acquire  a  new  value  and  meaning)  must  convince  us, 
that  sensuality,  attended  "of  necessity  with  sensual  worship,  was 


222 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


the  character  of  the  tribes  among  which  Abraham  was  dwelling ; 
that  in  this  sensuality  and  sensual  worship  was  involved  the 
neglect  of  family  bonds ;  that  the  witness  for  an  invisible  and 
righteous  God,  against  Gods  of  nature  and  mere  power,  was,  at 
the  selfsame  moment  and  by  the  same  necessity,  the  witness  for 
the  sacredness  of  these  bonds.  The  notion  of  a  Being  exercising 
power  over  men,  seen  in  the  clouds,  and  heard  in  the  winds,  this 
was  that  which  the  world  entertained,  and  trembled — till  utter 
corruption  brought  in  utter  atheism.  That  there  is  a  God  related 
to  men  and  made  known  to  men  through  their  human  relations, 
this  was  the  faith  of  Abraham,  the  beginner  of  the  Church  on 
earth.  But  this  truth  could  not  be  exhibited  in  one  individual 
faithful  man ;  it  must  be  exhibited  through  a  family.  The  rest  of 
Genesis,  therefore,  gives  us  the  history  if  the  patriarchs  who  fol- 
lowed Abraham.  But,  what  if  these,  or  any  of  these,  should  not 
he  faithful?  What,  if  they  should  not  maintain  the  principle  of 
family  relationship,  or  retain  a  recollection  of  the  higher  principle 
involved  in  it  t  What,  if  the  world  should  find  its  way  into  the 
Church  1  The  historian  does  not  wait  for  the  question  to  be  asked 
him ;  his  narrative  answers  it.  The  great  majority  of  the  sons  of 
Jacob  were  not  faithful  men,  they  did  not  maintain  the  principle  of 
family  life — they  did  not  recollect  the  Being  who  had  revealed 
Himself  through  it.  Perhaps  then,  the  Joseph,  the  true  believer, 
separated  himself  from  his  godless  brethren,  and  established  a  new 
and  distinct  fellowship.  Had  he  done  so,  he  would  have  acted 
upon  the  principle  of  Ishmael  or  Esau ;  he  would  have  founded  a 
society  which  was  built  upon  choice,  not  upon  relationship.  The 
historian  declares,  that  he  followed  a  different  course,  that  he  was 
indeed  separated  from  his  brethren,  but  by  their  act,  not  his :  that 
he  continued  a  witness  for  God's  covenant,  not  with  him,  but  with 
Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob ;  not  with  an  individual,  but  with  a 
family.  According  then  to  the  Jewish  Scriptures,  the  Abrahamic 
family,  though  cut  off  by  their  covenant  from  the  other  families  of 
the  earth,  was  so  cut  off  expressly  that  it  might  bear  witness  for 
the  true  order  of  the  world ;  for  that  order  against  which  all  sensi- 
ble idolatry,  and  all  independent  choice  or  self-will,  is  rebellion ; 
for  that  order  in  which  alone  men  can  be  free,  because  to  abide  in 
it  they  must  sacrifice  these  inclinations  which  make  them  slaves; 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


223 


for  that  order,  in  and  through  which,  as  we  might  have  guessed 
from  the  Gentile  records,  the  idea  of  God  can  alone  be  imparted. 
The  promise  of  the  covenant  therefore  was,  that  in  the  seed  of 
Abraham  all  the  families  of  the  earth  should  be  blessed. 

II.  But,  whatever  sentimentalists  may  say  about  the  patriarchal 
condition  of  the  world,  its  essential  purity,  and  the  misery  of  de- 
parting from  it,  the  Scriptures  give  no  countenance  to  such  dreams. 
It  was  part  of  the  promise  that  the  children  of  Jacob  should  enter 
into  another  state.  They  were  to  possess  the  Canaanitish  nations. 
They  were  to  become  a  nation.  And"  although  the  history,  in  strict 
conformity  to  all  experience,  describes  the  middle  passage  between 
these  two  conditions  as  a  grievous  one,  though  the  children  of  Abra-  ! 
ham  are  said  to  have  sunk  into  moral  debasement  and  actual  slave- 
ry, yet  their  redemption  is  connected  with  a  more  awful  revelation 
than  any  which  had  been  imparted,  or,  as  far  as  we  can  see,  could 
have  been  imparted  to  them  in  their  previous  state;  and  leads  to 
new  and  most  wonderful  discoveries  respecting  the  relations  be- 
tween men  and  God.  The  God  of  Abraham,  and  Isaac,  and  Jacob 
declares  that  he  remembers  his  covenant,  and  has  seen  the  affliction 
of  his  people.  But  He  declares  himself  to  the  appointed  guide  and 
deliverer  by  another  name  than  this — that  name  upon  which  the 
Jewish  covenant  stands,  which  is  the  foundation  of  all  lawT,  i  am 
that  i  am.  And  so  soon  as  the  judgments  upon  natural  worship, 
and  upon  a  tyranny  which  set  at  naught  all  invisible  and  righteous 
government  had  been  accomplished,  and  the  people  had  been  taught 
to  feel  that  an  unseen  Power  had  delivered  them,  that  awful  code 
was  proclaimed  amidst  thunders  and  lightnings,  which  spoke 
straight  to  the  individual  conscience  of  each  man,  even  while  it  re- 
minded him  in  the  most  direct  and  solemn  manner  that  he  was  re- 
lated to  God  and  his  brethren.  I  will  not  enter  here  into  an  ex- 
planation of  the  manner  in  which  the  tribe  institutions,  those  which 
speak  of  family  relationship,  were  so  embodied  in  the  Jewish  con- 
stitution that  they  gave  a  meaning  to  this  law  and  yet  did  not  de- 
prive it  of  its  awful  personal  character.  That  observation  must 
needs  strike  every  one  who  studies  with  the  slightest  attention  the 
Jewish  institutions,  as  they  are  described  in  the  Pentateuch.  It  is 
more  necessary  to  notice  those  which  led  the  thoughts  of  the  Jews 
above  the  bonds  of  family  and  of  lawT,  though  they  were  insepara- 


224  THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 

bly  intertwined  with  both.  I  mean  the  tabernacle,  the  priesthood, 
and  sacrifices.  That  these  were  the  shrines  of  an  undeveloped 
mystery  every  thoughtful  Jew  was  conscious ;  but  he  was  equally 
certain  that  this  mystery  was  implied  in  all  his  acts,  in  all  his  fami- 
ly relations,  in  the  national  order,  in  his  legal  obedience.  That 
there  was  an  awful  self-existent  Being  from  whom  all  law  came, 
was  declared  by  the  commandments :  the  Tabernacle  affirmed  that 
this  Being  was  present  among  his  people,  and  that  it  was  possible 
in  some  awful  manner  to  approach  Him.  The  family  covenant 
bore  witness  that  there  was  a  relation  between  Him  and  his  wor- 
shippers ;  the  Priesthood  from  generation  to  generation  witnessed 
that  this  relation  might  be  actually  realized — that  it  might  be  real- 
ized by  the  whole  people,  in  a  representative.  The  National  Con- 
stitution and  punishments  awakened  in  each  person  the  feeling  of 
moral  evil,  and  taught  them  that  that  evil  arose  from  violating  his 
relations  with  God  and  his  countrymen,  and  that  the  effect  of  it  was 
a  practical  exclusion  from  these  blessings  ;  the  sacrifices  intimated 
that  the  relation  was  restored,  when  he  had  personally,  and  through 
the  priest,  given  up  something,  not  selected  by  himself  as  the  most 
appropriate,  or  the  most  precious,  but  appointed  by  the  law  ;  and 
when  he  had  given  up  that  self-will  which  caused  the  separation. 
Such  thoughts  were  wrought  gradually  into  the  mind  of  every 
humble  and  obedient  J  ew  j  they  were  brought  directly  home  to  him 
by  the  parting  instruction  of  his  great  Lawgiver ;  they  were  con- 
firmed and  illustrated  by  all  his  subsequent  experience,  and  by  the 
teachers  who  showed  him  the  purpose  of  it. 

The  national  polity  of  the  Jews  was  in  its  essence  exclusive. 
We  dwell  upon  this  fact,  as  if  it  destroyed  all  connection  between 
this  polity  and  that  of  the  Pagans,  or  of  modern  Europe.  But  every 
nation,  as  such,  is  exclusive.  Athens  was  exclusive,  Rome  was 
exclusive;  nevertheless,  we  have  admitted,  all  persons  admit,  that 
more  of  humanity  came  out  in  the  exclusive  nations  of  Athens  and 
of  Rome,  than  ever  showed  itself  in  the  savage  tribes  of  the  earth, 
which  have  never  attained  to  a  definite  polity.  Before  we  can 
ascertain,  whether  the  exclusiveness  of  the  Jews  was  an  inhuman 
exclusiveness,  we  must  find  out  what  it  excluded ;  and  here  the 
same  answer  must  be  given  as  before.  It  excluded  the  worship  of 
sensible,  natural  things ;  it  excluded  the  idea  of  choice  and  self- 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION.  225 


will.  The  covenant  with  an  invisible  Being  made  it  treason  for 
men  to  choose  the  objects  of  their  worship.  This  worship  of  the 
one  Being  was  the  bond  of  the  commonwealth,  and,  if  this  were 
broken,  it  was  dissolved.  The  covenant  with  an  invisible  Being 
obliged  them  to  look  upon  all  Kings  as  reigning  in  virtue  of  his 
covenant,  as  representing  his  dignity,  as  responsible  to  Him  ;  upon 
all  other  officers,  the  priestly,  the  prophetical,  the  judicial,  as  in 
like  manner  directly  receiving  their  appointments  and  commission 
from  Him.  By  its  first  protest  it  affirmed  that  there  are  not  a  set  of 
separate  gods  over  each  territory — various,  according  to  the  pecu- 
liarities of  soil  and  of  climate  ;  but  that  there  is  one  Almighty  and 
Invisible  Being,  who  is  the  Lord  of  all.  The  God  of  Israel  is  de- 
clared to  be  the  God  of  all  the  nations  of  the  earth  ;  the  Israelites 
are  chosen  out  to  be  witnesses  of  the  fact.  By  the  second  protest 
the  exclusive  Hebrew  witnessed,  that  no  king,  no  priest,  no  judge, 
has  a  right  to  look  upon  himself  as  possessing  intrinsic  power ; 
that  he  is  exercising  office,  under  a  righteous  king,  a  perfect  priest, 
an  all-seeing  judge ;  that,  in  proportion  as  he  preserves  that  thought, 
and  in  the  strength  of  it  fulfils  his  task,  the  character  of  that  king, 
and  priest,  and  judge,  and  the  relation  in  which  he  stands  to  men, 
reveal  themselves  to  him ;  that  these  offices  are  continued  from 
generation  to  generation,  as  a  witness  of  his  permanence  who  is 
Lord  of  them  all,  and  who  abides  for  ever  and  ever. 

As  then  in  the  patriarchal  period  the  Divine  Being  manifest- 
ed himself  in  the  family  relations,  and  by  doing  so  manifested  on 
what  these  relations  depend,  how  they  are  upheld,  and  wherein 
their  worth  consists  :  so  in  the  national  period.  He  was  manifest- 
ed to  men  through  all  national  offices ;  thereby  explaining  their 
meaning  and  import,  how  they  are  upheld,  and  wherein  their  worth 
consists.  But,  we  are  not  to  suppose  that  the  family  relations  had 
less  to  do  with  this  stage  of  the  history  than  with  the  former.  As 
they  were  embodied  in  the  national  institutions,  as  the  existence  of 
these  institutions  depended  upon  them,  so  their  meaning  in  connec- 
tion with  national  life  and  national  sins,  and  with  a  Being  of  whom 
both  witnessed,  became  continually  more  apparent. 

I  need  not  point  out  to  any  one  who  reads  the  prophets,  what 
is  their  uniform  method  of  awakening  the  conscience  of  the  Jew, 
and  of  imparting  to  him  the  highest  truths.    I  need  not  say  that  the 

15 


226 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


Lord  is  throughout  presented  in  the  character  of  the  husband  of  the 
nation  ;  that  acts  of  apostasy  and  false  worship  are  constantly  re- 
ferred to  as  adulteries;  and  that  the  greatest  pains  are  taken  to  con- 
vince us,  that  these  are  no  poetical  flourishes  or  terms  of  art,  by 
connecting  the  actual  human  relation  and  human  offence  with  the 
properly  spiritual  one.  Oftentimes  the  verbal  commentator  is  at 
fault,  from  the  apparent  confusion  of  the  two.  He  cannot  make 
up  his  mind  whether  it  is  the  infidelity  of  the  nation  to  her  God,  or 
of  actual  wives  to  their  actual  husbands,  which  the  holy  man  is  de- 
nouncing. And  such  perplexity  there  must  needs  be  in  the  thoughts 
of  all  persons  who  are  determined  to  separate  these  two  ideas, — 
who  do  not  see  that  it  is  the  main  object  of  the  prophet  to  show 
their  bearing  upon  one  another, — who  will  not  enter  into  his  mind, 
by  feeling  that  human  relationships  are  not  artificial  types  of  some- 
thing divine,  but  are  actually  the  means,  and  the  only  means, 
through  which  man  ascends  to  any  knowledge  of  the  divine  ;  and 
that  every  breach  of  a  human  relation,  as  it  implies  a  violation  of 
the  higher  law,  so  also  is  a  hinderance  and  barrier  to  the  perception 
of  that  higher  law, — the  drawing  a  veil  between  the  spirit  of  a 
man  and  his  God. 

But,  how  did  this  idea  of  a  human  constitution  harmonize,  or 
come  into  collision  with  those  attempts  at  universal  empire,  which 
appeared  to  be  the  necessary  consummation  or  termination  of  the 
ancient  polities  ?  The  Asiatic  monarchies  have  been  sometimes 
called  patriarchal,  and  beyond  a  doubt  the  patriarchal  feeling — 
the  belief  that  the  king  was  the  father — did  lie  at  the  foundation 
of  them,  and  did  constitute  all  that  was  sound  and  healthful  in  the 
acts  of  the  monarch,  or  the  reverence  of  the  people.  But  if  we  are 
to  believe  the  Bible,  the  king  is  not  merely  a  father,  he  is  some- 
thing more ;  his  position  has  its  ground  in  the  acknowledgment  of 
an  unseen  absolute  Being,  whose  relations  to  men  lead  up  to  the 
contemplation  of  Him  in  Himself.  The  effort  therefore  to  make 
the  paternal  relation  all  in  all  is,  according  to  this  showing,  a  false 
effort,  one  necessarily  leading  to  false  results.  In  this  case  the  re- 
sult is  very  apparent.  The  power  of  the  monarch  not  having  any 
safe  ground  to  rest  upon,  soon  becomes  reverenced  merely  as  power. 
No  conscience  of  a  law,  which  they  ought  to  obey,  is  called  forth 
in  the  minds  of  the  subjects  or  the  monarch ;  he  may  have  kindly 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION.  227 

affections  towards  them,  which  may  be  reciprocated,  but  that  is  all. 
There  is  nothing  to  preserve  the  existence  and  sanctity  of  the 
family  relationship,  upon  which  the  sovereign  authority  is  built : 
nothing  to  resist  the  tendency  to  natural  worship,  which  destroys 
it :  nothing  to  hinder  the  monarch  from  believing  that  he  reigns 
by  his  own  right.  Hence,  these  so-called  patriarchal  governments, 
besides  that  they  awaken  neither  the  energies  of  the  human  intel- 
lect nor  the  perception  of  right  and  wrong,  soon  are  changed  into 
the  direct  contraries  of  that  which  they  profess  to  be.  The  father 
becomes  an  oppressor  of  his  own  people,  a  conqueror  of  others;  all 
idea  of  the  invisible  is  swallowed  up  in  a  reverence  for  him.  Ulti- 
mately he  is  looked  up  to  as  the  God  of  gods  and  the  Lord  of  lords. 
It  is  no  false  feeling  which  leads  us  to  rejoice  when  these  patriarchal 
kings  were  driven  back  by  the  little  national  bands  at  Marathon  or 
Plataea.  No  one  who  reveres  invisible  more  than  visible  strength, 
will  restrain  his  paeans  at  that  discomfiture.  It  is  a  hateful  and  a 
godless  thing  to  check  them,  or  to  stir  up  our  sympathy  on  behalf 
of  the  Eastern  tyrant.  He  who  cherishes  such  a  habit  of  feeling, 
will  not  be  able  to  rejoice,  whatever  he  may  fancy,  when  Pharaoh 
and  his  host  sink  like  lead  into  the  waters,  or,  when  Sisera  with  his 
six  hundred  chariots,  is  put  to  flight  by  the  prophetess  of  Israel. 

If  we  look  at  the  history  of  the  Jews,  we  shall  find  that  their 
distinct  polity  was  a  witness,  through  all  the  time  it  lasted,  against 
these  Babel  monarchies;  that  in  them  the  Jew  saw  that  world 
concentrated  in  its  worst  form,  out  of  which  the  covenant  with 
the  Abrahamic  family,  and  with  the  Israelitish  nation,  had  deliver- 
ed him.  To  be  like  this  world,  however,  to  share  its  splendours,  to 
adopt  its  worship,  was  the  perpetual  tendency  of  his  evil  nature,  a 
tendency  punished  at  length  by  subjection  to  its  tyranny.  But  it 
was  not  merely  by  punishment  that  this  inclination  wTas  resisted. 
The  wish  for  fellowship  with  other  nations  was  a  true  wrish  invert- 
ed ;  the  dream  of  a  human  polity  was  one  which  the  true  God  had 
sent  to  the  Jew,  though  he  had  been  taught  how  to  realize  it  by 
an  evil  spirit.  To  bring  out  the  true  idea  of  such  a  polity,  to  show 
how  it  lay  hid  in  all  their  own  institutions,  and  how  it  would  at 
length  be  brought  out  into  full  manifestation,  this  was  the  great 
office  of  the  Hebrew  Seer.  Side  by  side  with  that  vision  of  a 
Babylonian  kingdom,  which  he  taught  his  countrymen  to  look  upon 


228 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


as  based  upon  a  lying  principle,  the  contrary  of  their  own,  and  as 
meant  to  be  their  scourge  if  they  adopted  that  principle  into  their 
own  conduct,  rose  up  another  vision  of  a  king  who  did  not  judge 
after  the  sight  of  his  eyes  or  the  hearing  of  his  ears,  but  who  would 
rule  men  in  righteousness,  and  whom  the  heathen  should  own. 
And  as  each  new  step  in  the  history  of  the  covenant — the  first  call 
of  the  patriarch  which  made  them  a  family — their  deliverance  under 
Moses  which  made  them  a  nation — was  connected  with  a  fresh  re- 
velation of  the  Divine  King  through  these  different  relations,  neither 
displacing  the  other  but  adopting  it  into  itself;  this  glorious  vision 
would  have  been  utterly  imperfect,  if  it  had  not  involved  the  pros- 
pect of  such  a  discovery  as  had  not  been  vouchsafed  to  any  former 
age.  The  prophet,  trained  to  deep,  awful  meditation  in  the  law, 
the  history  of  his  land,  but  above  all  in  the  mysterious  services  of 
the  temple,  was  able  by  degrees  to  see,  as  one  sin  after  another,  one 
judgment  after  another  showed  him  what  were  the  dangers  and 
wants  of  his  nation,  that  the  heir  of  David's  throne  must  be  a  man, 
in  as  strict  a  sense  as  David  was,  capable,  not  of  less  but  of  infin- 
itely greater  sympathy  with  every  form  of  human  sorrowr  than  he 
had  been  capable  of,  and  yet  that  in  Him,  the  worshipper  must  be- 
hold God  less  limited  by  human  conceptions,  more  in  his  own  ab- 
soluteness and  awfulness,  than  even  in  the  burning  bush,  or  amidst 
the  lightnings  of  Sinai.  How  these  two  longings  could  be  both 
accomplished ;  how  idolatry  could  be  abolished  by  the  very  mani- 
festation which  would  bring  the  object  of  worship  more  near  to  all 
human  thoughts  and  apprehensions;  how  the  belief  of  a  Being 
nigh  to  men,  could  be  reconciled  with  that  of  one  dwelling  in  his 
own  perfection ;  how  unceasing  action  on  behalf  of  his  creatures 
consists  with  eternal  rest ;  how  He  could  be  satisfied  with  men,  and 
yet  be  incapable  of  satisfaction  with  any  thing  less  pure  and  holy 
than  himself ;  these  were  the  awful  questions  with  which  the  pro- 
phet's soul  was  exercised,  and  which  were  answered,  not  at  once, 
but  in  glimpses  and  flashes  of  light  coming  across  the  darkness  of 
his  own  soul,  and  of  his  country's  condition,  which  even  now  startle 
us  as  we  read,  and  make  us  feel  that  the  words  are  meant  to  guide 
us  through  our  own  confusions,  and  not  to  give  us  notions  or  for- 
mulas for  disguising  them.  One  part  of  his  teaching  must  have 
been  derived  from  that  polity,  which  was  the  great  contrast  to  his 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


229 


own.  The  universal  monarchs,  the  Sennacheribs  and  Nebuchad- 
nezzars,  were  Men-gods.  They  took  to  themselves  the  attributes 
of  the  Invisible  :  and  just  in  proportion  as  they  did  so,  just  in  pro- 
portion as  they  hid  the  view  of  any  thing  beyond  humanity  from 
the  eyes  of  men,  just  in  that  proportion  did  they  become  inhuman, 
separate  from  their  kind,  dwelling  apart  in  an  infernal  solitude. 

This  black  ground  brought  the  perfectly  clear  bright  object 
more  distinctly  within  their  view;  they  felt  that  the  God-man,  in 
whom  the  fulness  and  awfulness  of  Godhead  should  shine  forth, 
might  therefore  have  perfect  sympathy  with  the  poorest  and  most 
friendless,  and  might  at  the  same  time  enable  them  to  enter  into 
that  transcendent  region  which  their  spirits  had  ever  been  seeking 
and  never  been  able  to  penetrate. 

III.  Now,  when  we  open  the  first  book  of  the  New  Testament, 
the  first  words  of  it  announce  that  the  subject  of  it  is  the  Son  of 
David  and  the  Son  of  Abraham.  As  we  read  on,  we  find  that,  ac- 
cording to  the  belief  of  the  writer,  this  person  came  into  the  world 
to  establish  a  Kingdom.  Every  act  and  word  which  is  recorded  of 
Him,  has  reference  to  this  kingdom.  A  voice  is  heard  crying  in 
the  wilderness,  that  a  kingdom  is  at  hand.  Jesus  of  Nazareth  comes 
preaching  the  Gospel  of  the  kingdom.  He  goes  into  a  mount  to 
deliver  the  principles  of  his  kingdom.  He  speaks  parables  to  the 
people,  nearly  every  one  of  which  is  prefaced  with,  "  The  king- 
dom of  heaven  is  like."  He  heals  the  sick :  it  is  that  the  Jews 
may  know  that  his  kingdom  is  come  nigh  to  them.  His  private 
conferences  with  his  disciples,  just  as  much  as  his  public  discourses, 
relate  to  t»he  character,  the  establishment,  and  the  destinies  of  this 
kingdom.  He  is  arraigned  before  Pontius  Pilate  for  claiming  to 
be  a  king.    The  superscription  on  the  cross  proclaims  him  a  king. 

That  there  is  a  difference  of  character  and  style  in  the  different 
Evangelists,  and  that  a  hundred  different  theories  may  be  suggested 
as  to  their  origin,  their  coincidences,  their  varieties,  no  one  will 
deny.  But  that  this  characteristic  is  common  to  them  all,  that  the 
most  sweeping  doctrine  respecting  the  interpolations  which  have 
crept  into  them  could  not  eliminate  it  out  of  them,  that  it  would 
not  be  the  least  affected  if  the  principle  and  method  of  their  forma- 
tion were  ascertained,  is  equally  true.  The  kingdom  of  Christ  is 
under  one  aspect  or  other  the  subject  of  them  all.    But  this  pecu- 


230 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


liarity,  it  will  be  said,  is  easily  accounted  for.  The  writers  of  the 
New  Testament  are  Jews;  language  of  this  kind  is  essentially  Jew- 
ish. It  belonged  to  the  idiosyncrasy  of  the  most  strange  and  bigot- 
ed of  all  the  people  of  the  earth.  To  a  certain  extent,  the  reader 
will  perceive,  these  statements  exactly  tally  with  mine.  I  have  en- 
deavoured to  show  that  the  habit  of  thinking,  which  this  perpetual 
use  of  a  certain  phrase  indicates,  is  Jewish,  and  why  it  is  Jewish. 
But  there  is  a  long  step  from  this  admission,  to  the  one  which  is  gen- 
erally supposed  to  be  involved  in  it,  that  this  phrase  is  merely  con- 
nected w7ith  particular  accidents  and  circumstances,  and  has  nothing 
to  do  wTith  that  which  is  essential  and  human.  According  to  my 
view  of  the  position  of  the  Israelite,  he  was  taken  out  of  all  nations 
expressly  to  be  a  witness  of  that  which  is  unchanging  and  perma- 
nent, of  that  which  is  not  modal,  of  the  meaning  of  those  relation- 
ships which  belonged  to  him  in  common  with  the  Pagans  and  with 
us,  and  which,  as  every  Pagan  felt,  and  as  every  peasant  among  us 
feels,  have  a  meaning,  and  of  the  ground  and  purpose  of  national 
institutions  and  of  law,  which  the  Pagans  acknowledged,  and  which 
most  of  us  acknowledge,  to  be  the  great  distinction  between  men  and 
brutes.  And  since  beneath  these  relationships,  and  this  national 
polity,  the  Pagans  believed,  and  we  believe,  that  seme  other  polity 
is  lying,  not  limited  like  the  former,  not  exclusive  like  the  latter,  I 
cannot  see  why  wre  are  to  talk  of  the  prejudices  and  idiosyncracies 
of  the  Jew,  because  he  expresses  this  universal  idea  in  the  wrords 
which  are  the  simplest  and  the  aptest  to  convey  it.  That,  say  the 
Evangelists,  which  w7e  have  been  promised,  that  which  we  expect, 
is  a  Kingdom ;  this  Jesus  of  Nazareth  we  believe  and  affirm  to  be  the 
King.  Either  proposition  may  be  denied.  It  may  be  said,  "  Men 
are  not  in  want  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  society."  It  may  be 
said,  "  This  person  has  not  the  credentials  of  the  character  which 
he  assumes."  But  it  must,  according  to  all  ordinary  rules  of  criti- 
cism, be  admitted  that  this  was  the  idea  of  the  Evangelists,  and  we 
ought  surely,  in  studying  an  author,  to  seek  that  wTe  may  enter  into 
his  idea,  before  we  substitute  for  it  one  of  our  own. 

I  am  aware,  however,  that  the  objector  would  be  ready  with  an 
answer  to  this  statement,  and  that  it  is  one  which  will  derive  no  lit- 
tle countenance  from  the  opinions  which  are  current  among  religious 
people,  and  therefore  will  have  no  inconsiderable  weight  with  them. 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


231 


It  will  be  said,  "  We  have  an  excuse  for  this  attempt  to  separate  the 
inward  sense  of  the  Gospels  from  their  Jewish  accidents,  in  the  in- 
consistency which  we  discover  in  the  use  of  those  very  phrases  to 
which  you  allude.  Do  not  the  Evangelists  constantly  represent  this 
kingdom  as  if  it  were  an  outward  and  visible  kingdom,  just  like 
that  of  David  and  Solomon,  nay,  that  very  kingdom  restored  and 
extended  ?  as  something  to  supersede  the  government  of  Herod,  ul- 
timately perhaps  that  of  the  Cesars  ?  And  do  they  not  at  the  same 
time  introduce  such  words  as  these  and  attribute  them  to  their  Mas- 
ter: 'The  kingdom  of  God  cometh  not  with  observation,'  '  The 
kingdom  of  God  is  within  you,'  '  My  kingdom  is  not  of  this  world,' 
— words  which  indicate  that  He  taught  (at  least  commonly)  an- 
other doctrine,  which  has  become  leavened  with  these  coarser  and 
more  sensual  elements  ?  If  so,  are  we  not  justified  in  decomposing 
the  mass,  and  taking  out  the  pure  ore  ?" 

I  think  the  reader,  who  has  gone  along  with  me  thus  far,  will 
not  be  much  staggered  by  this  argument.  The  kingdom  of  David, 
the  kingdom  of  Solomon,  was  distinguished  from  the  kingdoms  of 
this  world.  It  did  not  come  with  observation.  It  stood  upon  the 
principle  which  other  kingdoms  set  at  naught — the  principle  that  the 
visible  king  is  the  type  of  the  invisible,  that  he  reigns  in  virtue  of  a 
covenant  between  the  invisible  king  and  the  nation,  that  he  is  subject 
to  a  divine  law.  This  principle,  which  was  practically  denied  in  all  the 
great  nations  of  the  earth — denied  then  especially  and  emphatically 
when  they  became  kingdoms  (the  ordinary,  apparently  the  neces- 
sary, consummation  of  them  all,) — the  Israelitish  kingdom  existed 
to  enforce.  All  through  the  history,  the  tendency  of  the  nation  and 
its  kings  to  set  at  naught  the  constitutional  principle,  to  forget  the 
covenant,  is  manifest ;  but  this  very  tendency  proved  the  truth  of 
the  idea  against  which  it  warred.  If  this  be  so,  what  contradiction 
was  it  to  affirm  that  the  new  kingdom  wras  the  kingdom  promised 
to  David,  the  kingdom  of  his  son,  and  yet  that  it  was  in  the  high- 
est sense  a  kingdom  not  to  be  observed  by  the  outwTard  eye,  a  king- 
dom within,  a  kingdom  not  of  this  wrorld  ? 

Do  I  mean  that  there  was  nothing  startling:  in  such  announce- 
ments  to  all  or  to  most  of  those  who  first  heard  them  ?  If  I  did,  I 
should  be  rejecting  the  express  testimony  of  the  Evangelists.  They 
tell  us  that  the  leading  members  of  the  Jewish  commonwealth,  and 


232 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


all  the  most  admired  and  popular  sects  which  divided  it,  were  con- 
tinually perplexed  and  outraged  by  this  language.  But  they  tell 
us  also,  that  these  same  persons  had  lost  the  family  and  national 
character  of  Hebrews,  that  they  perverted  the  express  commands 
of  God  respecting  the  honouring  of  fathers  and  mothers,  that  they 
had  no  feelings  of  fellowship  with  Israelites  as  Israelites,  but  glori- 
fied themselves  in  their  difference  from  the  rest  of  their  countrymen 
either  on  the  score  of  righteousness  or  of  wisdom ;  that  individual 
self-exaltation,  on  one  or  the  other  of  these  grounds,  was  their  dis- 
tinguishing characteristic.  They  tell  us,  in  strict  consistency  with 
these  observations,  that  these  men  were  never  so  scandalized  as 
when  Jesus  spoke  of  his  Father,  of  his  coming  to  do  his  will,  of 
his  knowing  Him,  and  being  one  with  Him.  The  idea  of  a  relation 
between  men  and  their  Maker,  which  was  the  idea  implied  in  the 
Abrahamic  covenant,  had  wholly  departed  from  them ;  and  there- 
fore, the  hope  of  a  complete  manifestation  of  the  ground  upon 
which  this  relationship  rested,  the  hope  which  had  sustained  every 
suffering  Israelite  in  every  age — which  was  expressly  the  hope  of 
Israel — could  not  be  cherished  by  them.  Their  idea  of  God  was 
the  heathen  one  of  a  Being  sitting  in  the  clouds  or  diffused  through 
the  universe,  entirely  separated  from  his  worshippers,  incapable  of 
speaking  through  men  to  men,  only  declaring  himself  by  signs,  like 
those  of  the  red  sky  in  the  morning  and  the  lowering  sky  in  the 
evening.  And  therefore  the  king  they  expected  was  the  counter- 
part of  the  absolute  Emperor.  It  is  true  that  the  awful  words, 
*We  have  no  king  but  Cesar."  would  not  have  been  uttered  at 
any  other  moment  than  the  one  which  called  them  forth ;  that  it 
required  the  most  intense  hatred  and  all  the  other  passions  which 
then  had  possession  of  their  hearts,  to  induce  the  priests  formally 
to  abandon  the  dream  of  Jewish  supremacy;  and  that  they  proba- 
bly reserved  to  themselves  a  right  of  maintaining  one  doctrine  in 
the  schools,  another  in  the  judgment-hall.  Still  these  words  ex- 
pressed the  most  inward  thought  of  the  speakers;  the  king  of  Abra- 
ham's seed  whom  they  wanted  was  a  Cesar  and  nothing  else. 

But  those  who  amidst  much  confusion  and  ignorance  had  really 
claimed  their  position  as  members  of  a  nation  in  covenant  with 
God ;  those  who  had  walked  in  the  ordinances  of  the  Lord  blame- 
less, finding  in  every  symbol  of  the  Divine  Presence,  which  seemed 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


233 


to  the  world  a  phantom,  the  deepest  reality,  and  in  what  the  world 
called  realities,  the  merest  phantoms ;  those  who  were  conscious 
of  their  own  darkness,  but  rested  upon  the  promise  of  a  light  which 
should  arise  and  shine  upon  their  land ;  those  who,  uniting  to  pub- 
lic shame  a  miserable  sense  of  moral  evil,  looked  for  a  deliverer 
from  both  at  once  ;  those  to  whom  the  sight  of  the  Roman  soldier 
was  oppressive,  not  because  it  reminded  them  of  their  tribute,  but 
because  it  told  them  that  the  national  life  was  gone,  or  lasted  only 
in  their  prayers ;  those  who  under  the  fig-tree  had  besought  God 
that  the  clouds  which  hid  his  countenance  from  them  might  be 
dispersed,  that  He  would  remember  the  poor,  and  that  men  might 
not  have  the  upper  hand :  these,  whether  or  no  they  could  recon- 
cile in  their  understandings  the  idea  of  a  kingdom  which  should 
rule  over  all  with  one  which  should  be  in  their  hearts,  at  least 
acknowledged  inwardly  that  only  one  to  which  both  descriptions 
were  applicable,  could  meet  the  cries  which  they  had  sent  up  to 
heaven.  And  whatever  they  saw  of  Him  who  was  proclaimed 
the  king,  whatever  they  heard  Him  speak,  tended  to  bring  these 
thoughts  into  harmony,  or,  at  all  events,  to  make  them  feel  that 
each  alike  was  necessary.  He  exercised  power  over  the  elements 
and  over  the  secret  functions  of  the  human  body,  (of  course  I  am 
assuming  the  story  of  the  Evangelists,  my  object  being  to  show 
that  the  different  parts  of  it  are  thoroughly  consistent,  when  they 
are  viewed  in  reference  to  one  leading  idea,)  but  this  power  is 
exercised  for  the  sake  of  timid  fishermen,  of  paralytics  and  lepers. 
He  declares  that  his  kingdom  is  like  unto  a  grain  of  mustard-seed, 
which  is  indeed  the  least  of  all  seeds,  but  which  becomes  a  tree 
wherein  the  fowls  of  the  air  lodge  ;  He  declares  also  that  this  seed 
of  the  kingdom  is  scattered  over  different  soils,  and  that  the  right 
soil  for  it  is  in  an  honest  heart.  His  acts  produce  the  most  obvious 
outward  effects,  yet  their  main  effect  is  to  carry  the  persuasion 
home  to  the  mind  of  the  prepared  observer,  that  a  communion  had 
been  opened  between  the  visible  and  the  invisible  world,  and  that 
the  one  was  under  the  power  of  the  other.  His  words  were  ad- 
dressed to  Israelites  as  the  children  of  the  covenant,  yet  every  one 
of  them  tended  to  awaken  in  these  Israelites  a  sense  of  humanity , 
a  feeling  that  to  be  Israelites  they  must  be  more.  And  all  this 
general  language  was  preparatory  to  the  discoveries  which  were  ; 


234 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


made  in  that  last  supper,  when,  having  loved  his  own  who  were 
in  the  world,  He  loved  them  unto  the  end, — to  the  announcements 
that  they  were  all  united  in  Him,  as  the  branch  is  united  to  the 
vine — that  there  was  a  still  more  wonderful  union  between  Him 
and  his  Father,  to  the  knowledge  of  which  they  might  through 
this  union  attain — and  that  a  Spirit  would  come  to  dwell  with 
them  and  to  testify  of  Him  and  of  the  Father.  All  which  dis- 
courses to  men  are  gathered  up  in  the  amazing  prayer,  "  That 
they  all  may  be  one,  as  thou,  Father,  art  in  me,  and  I  in  thee,  that 
they  may  be  one  in  us." 

Either  those  words  contain  the  essence  and  meaning  of  the 
whole  history,  or  that  history  must  be  rejected  as  being  from  first 
to  last  the  wickedest  lie  and  the  most  awful  blasphemy  ever  palmed 
upon  the  world.  And  if  they  do  contain  the  meaning  of  it,  that 
meaning  must  be  embodied  in  acts.  The  Evangelists  therefore  go 
on  to  record  in  words  perfectly  calm  and  simple,  the  death  of  their 
master  and  his  resurrection.  As  events  they  are  related  ;  no  com- 
ment is  made  upon  them ;  few  hints  are  given  of  any  effects  to 
follow  from  them.  We  are  made  to  feel  by  the  quiet  accurate 
detail,  "  He  certainly  died,  who,  as  we  believed,  was  the  Son  of 
God,  and  the  King  of  Israel ;  He  actually  rose  with  his  body,  and 
came  among  us  who  knew  Him,  and  spake  and  ate  with  us  :  this 
is  the  accomplishment  of  the  union  between  heaven  and  earth  ;  it 
is  no  longer  a  word,  it  is  a  fact."  And  of  this  fact,  the  risen  Lord 
tells  his  Apostles  that  they  are  to  go  into  the  world  and  testify ; 
nor  merely  to  testify  of  it ;  but  to  adopt  men  into  a  society  grounded 
upon  the  accomplishment  of  it.  In  connection  with  that  command, 
and  as  the  ultimate  basis  of  the  universal  society,  a  name  is  pro- 
claimed, in  which  the  name  that  had  been  revealed  to  Abraham, 
and  that  more  awful  one  which  Moses  heard  in  the  bush,  are  com- 
bined and  reconciled. 

To  a  person  who  has  contemplated  the  Gospel  merely  as  the 
case  of  certain  great  doctrines  or  fine  moralities,  the  Ms  of  the 
Apostles  must  be  an  utterly  unintelligible  book.  For  in  the  speci- 
mens of  the  Apostles'  preaching  which  it  gives  us,  there  ere  com- 
paratively few  references  to  the  discourses  or  the  parables  of  our 
Lord.  They  dwell  mainly  upon  the  great  acts  of  death  and  resur- 
rection as  evidences  that  Jesus  was  the  king,  as  expounding  and 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


235 


consummating  the  previous  history  of  the  Jewish  people,  as  justify- 
ing and  realizing  the  truth  which  worked  in  the  minds  of  the 
heathen,  u  that  we  are  his  offspring/'  On  the  other  hand  a  per- 
son who  really  looks  upon  the  Bible  as  the  history  of  the  establish- 
ment of  a  universal  and  spiritual  kingdom,  of  that  kingdom  which 
God  had  ever  intended  for  men,  and  of  which  the  universal  king- 
dom then  existing  in  the  world  was  the  formal  opposite,  will  find 
in  this  book  exactly  that  without  which  all  the  former  records 
would  be  unmeaning. 

The  narrator  of  such  transcendent  events,  as  the  ascension  of 
the  Son  of  Man  into  the  invisible  glory,  or  the  descent  of  the  Spirit 
to  take  possession  of  the  feelings,  thoughts,  utterances  of  mortal 
men,  might  have  been  expected  to  stand  still  and  wonder  at  that 
which  with  so  entire  a  belief  he  was  recording.  But  no — he  looks 
upon  these  events  as  the  necessary  consummation  of  all  that  went 
before,  the  necessary  foundations  of  the  existence  of  the  Church. 
And  therefore,  he  can  quietly  relate  any  other  circumstances,  how- 
ever apparently  disproportionate,  which  were  demanded  for  the 
outward  manifestation  and  development  of  that  Church,  such  as  the 
meeting  of  the  Apostles  in  the  upper  room,  and  the  completion  of 
their  number.  If  the  foundation  of  this  kingdom  were  the  end  of 
all  the  purposes  of  God,  if  it  were  the  kingdom  of  God  among 
men,  the  human  conditions  of  it  could  be  no  more  passed  over  than 
the  divine ;  it  was  as  needful  to  prove  that  the  ladder  had  its  foot 
upon  earth,  as  that  it  had  come  down  out  of  heaven.  As  we 
proceed,  we  find  every  new  step  of  the  story  leading  us  to  notice 
the  Church  as  the  child  which  the  Jewish  polity  had  for  so  many 
ages  been  carrying  in  its  womb.  Its  filial  relation  is  first  demon- 
strated, it  is  shown  to  be  an  Israelitic  not  a  mundane  common- 
wealth ;  then  it  is  shown,  that  though  not  mundane,  it  is  essentially 
human,  containing  a  principle  of  expansion  greater  than  that  which 
dwelt  in  the  Roman  empire. 

And  here  lies  the  apparent  contradiction,  the  real  harmony  of 
these  two  aspects  in  which  this  kingdom  was  contemplated  by  the 
Apostles  of  the  circumcision  and  by  St.  Paul.  The  one  witnessed 
fpr  the  continuity  of  it,  the  other  for  its  freedom  from  all  national 
exclusions.  These,  we  may  believe,  were  their  respective  offices. 
Yet,  as  each  fulfilled  the  one,  he  was  in  fact  teaching  the  other 


236 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


truth  most  effectually.  St.  Peter  and  St.  James  were  maintaining 
the  universality  of  the  Church,  while  they  were  contending  for  its 
Jewish  character  and  derivation.  St.  Paul  was  maintaining  the 
national  covenant,  while  he  was  telling  the  Gentiles,  that  if  they 
were  circumcised  Christ  would  profit  them  nothing.  Take  away 
the  first  testimony  and  the  Church  becomes  an  earthly  not  a  spirit- 
ual commonwealth,  and  therefore  subject  to  earthly  limitations ; 
take  away  the  second,  and  the  promise  to  Abraham  is  unfulfilled. 
In  another  sense,  as  the  canon  of  Scripture  shows,  St.  Paul  was 
more  directly  carrying  out  the  spirit  of  the  Jewish  distinction,  by 
upholding  the  distinctness  of  ecclesiastical  communities  according 
to  tribes  and  countries  than  the  Apostles  of  Jerusalem ;  and  they 
were  carrying  out  the  idea  of  the  universality  of  the  Church  more 
than  he  did  by  addressing  the  members  of  it  as  of  an  entire  com- 
munity dispersed  through  different  parts  of  the  world. 

But  we  must  not  forget,  that  while  this  universal  society, 
according  to  the  historical  conception  of  it,  grew  out  of  the  Jewish 
family  and  nation,  it  is,  according  to  the  theological  conception  of 
it,  the  root  of  both.  "  That,"  says  Aristotle,*  "  which  is  first  as 
cause  is  last  in  discovery."  And  this  beautiful  formula  is  transla- 
ted into  life  and  reality  in  the  letter  to  the  Ephesians,  when  St. 
Paul  tells  them  that  they  were  created  in  Christ  before  all  wyorlds, 
and  when  he  speaks  of  the  transcendent  economy  as  being  gradu- 
ally revealed  to  the  Apostles  and  Prophets  by  the  Spirit.  In  this 
passage  it  seems  to  me,  lies  the  key  to  the  whole  character  of  the 
dispensation,  as  w7ell  as  of  the  books  in  which  it  is  set  forth.  If 
the  Gospel  be  the  revelation  or  unveiling  of  a  mystery  hidden  from 
ages  and  generations ;  if  this  mystery  be  the  true  constitution  of 
humanity  in  Christ,  so  that  a  man  believes  and  acts  a  lie  who  does 
not  claim  for  himself  union  with  Christ,  we  can  understand  why 
the  deepest  writings  of  the  New  Testament,  instead  of  being 
digests  of  doctrine,  are  epistles,  explaining  to  those  who  had  been 
admitted  into  the  Church  of  Christ  their  own  position,  bringing 
out  that  side  of  it  which  had  reference  to  the  circumstances  in 
which  they  were  placed,  or  to  their  most  besetting  sins,  and  show- 
ing what  life  was  in  consistency,  what  life  at  variance  with  it. 


to  tiqojiov  aiTiov  laxaxov  'lv  JV  Bigtaei, 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


237 


can  understand  why  the  opening  of  the  first  of  these  epistles,  of 
the  one  which  has  been  supposed  to  be  most  like  a  systematic 
treatise,  announces  that  the  Gospel  is  concerning  Jesus  Christ,  who 
was  made  of  the  seed  of  David  according  to  the  flesh,  and  marked 
out  as  the  Son  of  God  with  power,  according  to  the  Spirit  of  holi- 
ness, by  the  resurrection  of  the  dead.  The  fact  of  a  union  between 
the  Godhead  and  humanity  is  thus  set  forth  as  the  one  which  the 
Apostle  felt  himself  appointed  to  proclaim,  which  was  the  ground 
of  the  message  to  the  Gentiles,  and  in  which  all  ideas  of  reconcili- 
ation, of  a  divine  life,  justification  by  faith,  sanctiflcation  by  the 
Spirit,  were  implicitly  contained.  We  can  understand  why  the 
great  fight  of  the  Apostle  with  the  Corinthians  should  be  because 
they  exalted  certain  notions,  and  certain  men  as  the  representatives 
of  these  notions,  into  the  place  of  Him  who  was  the  Lord  of  their 
fellowship,  and  why  pride,  sensuality,  contempt  of  others,  abuse  of 
ordinances  should  be  necessarily  consequent  upon  that  sin.  We 
can  understand  why  St.  Paul  curses  with  such  vehemence  those 
false  teachers  who  had  denied  the  Galatians  the  right  to  call  them- 
selves children  of  God  in  Christ  in  virtue  of  the  new  covenant, 
and  had  sent  them  back  to  the  old.  We  may  perceive  that  those 
wonderful  words  in  which  he  addresses  the  Ephesians,  when  he 
tells  them  that  they  were  sitting  in  heavenly  places  in  Christ  Jesus, 
are  just  as  real  and  practical  as  the  exhortations  at  the  end  of  the 
same  letter,  respecting  the  duties  of  husbands  and  wives,  fathers 
and  children,  and  that  the  second  are  involved  in  the  first.  We 
may  see  what  connection  there  is  between  the  entreaty  to  the 
Colossians  not  to  stoop  to  will  worship  and  the  service  of  Angels, 
and  the  assertion  of  the  fact,  that  Christ  was  in  them  the  hope  of 
glory,  and  that  He  is  the  head  in  whom  dwell  all  the  riches  of 
wisdom  and  knowledge.  We  may  see  how  possible  it  was  for 
some  of  the  Philippian  Church  to  be  enemies  to  the  cross  of  Christ, 
their  god  their  belly,  their  glory  their  shame,  not  because  they  had 
not  been  admitted  to  the  privileges  of  being  members  of  Christ, 
but  because  they  had  not  pressed  forward  to  realize  their  claim. 
We  may  enter  a  little  into  the  idea  of  the  letter  to  the  Thessaloni- 
ans,  however  we  may  differ  about  the  particular  time  or  times  of 
its  accomplishment,  that  there  must  be  a  coeval  manifestation  of 
the  mystery  of  iniquity  and  of  the  mystery  of  godliness;  that  the 


238 


THE  SCRIPTURAL  VIEW 


two  kingdoms  being  always  in  conflict,  at  certain  great  crises  of 
the  world,  are  brought  into  direct  and  open  collision.  We  shall 
not  need  any  evidence  of  the  Apostolical  derivation  of  the  epistle  to 
the  Hebrews,  to  convince  us,  that  it  unfolds  the  relations  between 
the  national  and  the  universal  dispensation,  between  that  which 
was  the  shadow  and  that  which  was  the  substance  of  a  Divine 
humanity ;  between  that  which  enabled  the  worshipper  to  expect 
a  perfect  admission  into  the  Divine  presence,  and  that  which  admit- 
ted him  to  it ;  between  that  which  revealed  God  to  him  as  the 
enemy  of  evil,  and  that  which  revealed  Him  as  the  conqueror  of 
it.  Nor  is  it  inconsistent  with  any  previous  intimation  which  has 
been  given  us,  that  the  writer  of  this  epistle  should  in  every  part 
of  it  represent  the  sin  of  men  as  consisting  in  their  unbelief  of  the 
blessings  into  which  they  are  received  at  each  stage  of  the  Divine 
manifestation,  and  that  he  should  with  solemn  earnestness,  mixed 
with  warnings  of  a  fearful  and  hopeless  apostasy,  urge  those  whom 
he  is  addressing  to  believe  that  the  position  into  which  they  had 
been  brought  was  that  after  which  all  former  ages  had  been  aspiring, 
and  as  such,  to  claim  it.  From  these  exhortations  and  admonitions, 
the  transition  is  easy  to  those  Catholic  epistles  which  some  have 
found  it  so  hard  to  reconcile  with  the  doctrine  of  St.  Paul.  And 
doubtless,  if  the  faith  which  the  epistle  to  the  Romans  and  the 
epistle  to  the  Hebrews  adjured  men,  by  such  grand  promises  and 
dire  threats,  to  exercise,  were  not  faith  in  a  living  Being,  who  had 
adopted  men  into  fellowship  with  himself  on  purpose  that  being 
righteous  by  virtue  of  that  union  they  might  do  righteous  acts,  that 
having  claimed  their  peace  as  members  of  a  body  the  Spirit  might 
work  in  them  to  will  and  to  do  of  his  good  pleasure,  the  assertions 
that  faith  without  works  saves,  and  that  faith  without  works  cannot 
save,  are  hopelessly  irreconcilable.  But  if  the  idea  of  St.  Paul,  as 
much  as  of  St.  James,  be,  that  all  worth  may  be  attributed  to  faith, 
in  so  far  forth  as  it  unites  us  to  an  object  and  raises  us  out  of  our- 
selves— no  worth  at  all,  so  far  as  it  is  contemplated  simply  as  a 
property  in  ourselves  ;  if  this  be  the  very  principle  which  the  whole 
Bible  is  developing,  one  does  not  well  see  what  either  position 
would  be  good  for,  if  the  other  were  wanting.  If  our  Lord  came 
among  men  that  he  might  bring  them  into  a  kingdom  of  righteous- 
ness, peace,  and  joy,  because  a  kingdom  grounded  upon  fellowship 


OF  THIS  CONSTITUTION. 


239 


with  a  righteous  and  perfect  Being,  the  notion  that  that  righteous- 
ness can  ever  belong  to  any  man  in  himself,  and  the  notion  that 
every  one  is  not  to  exhibit  the  fruits  of  it  in  himself  would  seem 
to  be  equally  contradictions.  And  therefore  I  believe  without  this 
consideration  we  shall  be  as  much  puzzled  by  the  sketch  of  a 
Christian  man's  life,  discipline,  and  conflicts,  in  the  epistle  of  St. 
Peter,  and  by  the  doctrine  of  St.  John,  that  love  is  the  consumma- 
tion of  all  God's  revelations  and  all  man's  strivings,  as  by  any 
former  part  of  the  book.  For  that  men  are  not  to  gain  a  kingdom 
hereafter,  but  are  put  in  possession  of  it  now,  and  that  through  their 
chastisements  and  the  oppositions  of  their  evil  nature,  they  are  to 
learn  its  character  and  enter  into  its  privileges,  is  surely  taught  in 
every  verse  of  the  one ;  and  that  love  has  been  manifested  unto 
men,  that  they  have  been  brought  into  fellowship  with  it,  that  by 
that  fellowship  they  may  rise  to  the  fruition  of  it,  and  that  this 
fellowship  is  for  us  as  members  of  a  family,  so  that  he  who  loveth 
God  must  love  his  brother  also,  is  affirmed  again  and  again  in 
express  words  of  the  other.  With  such  thoughts  in  our  mind,  I 
believe  we  may  venture,  with  hope  of  the  deepest  instruction,  upon 
the  study  of  the  last  book  in  the  Bible.  For  though  we  may  not 
be  able  to  determine  which  of  all  the  chronological  speculations 
respecting  it  is  the  least  untenable,  though  we  may  not  decide  con- 
fidently whether  it  speaks  to  us  of  the  future  or  of  the  past,  whether 
it  describes  a  conflict  of  principles  or  of  persons,  of  this  we  shall 
have  no  doubt,  that  it  does  exhibit  at  one  period  or  through  all 
periods  a  real  kingdom  of  heaven  upon  earth,  a  kingdom  of  which 
the  principle  must  be  ever  the  same,  a  kingdom  to  which  all  king- 
doms are  meant  to  be  in  subjection  ;  a  kingdom  which  is  main- 
taining itself  against  an  opposing  tyranny,  whereof  the  ultimate 
law  is  brute  force  or  unalloyed  selfishness  ;  a  kingdom  which  must 
prevail  because  it  rests  upon  a  name  which  expresses  the  perfect 
Love,  the  ineffable  Unity,  the  name  of  the  Father,  and  of  the  Son, 
and  of  the  Holy  Ghost. 


CHAPTER  IV. 


SIGNS  OF  A  SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 

We  have  observed  the  traces  of  a  spiritual  constitution  for  man- 
kind. We  have  observed  that  the  two  parts  of  this  constitution, 
which  are  united  by  family  relationships  and  by  locality,  depend 
upon  a  third  part  which  is  universal.  We  have  observed  that 
there  are  two  possible  forms  of  a  universal  society,  one  of  which  is 
destructive  of  the  family  and  national  principle,  the  other  the  ex- 
pansion of  them.  The  first  of  these  is  that  which  in  Scripture  is 
called  this  world,  the  latter  is  that  which  in  Scripture  is  called 
the  church.  We  have  observed  that  the  principles  of  the  world 
exist  in  the  heart  of  every  family  and  of  every  nation ;  that  they 
are  precisely  the  natural  tendencies  and  inclinations  of  men ;  that 
they  are  always  threatening  to  become  predominant;  that  when 
they  become  predominant  there  ceases  to  be  any  recognition  of  men 
as  related  to  a  Being  above  them,  any  recognition  of  them  as  pos- 
sessing a  common  humanity.  The  other  body,  therefore,  the 
Church,  being  especially  the  witness  for  these  facts  which  it  is 
natural  to  us  to  deny,  must  be  a  distinct  body.  In  losing  its  dis- 
tinctness it  loses  its  meaning,  loses  to  all  intents  and  purposes, 
though  the  words  may  at  first  sound  paradoxical,  its  universality. 
The  question  then  which  we  have  to  examine  is,  are  there  any  signs 
in  the  present  day  of  the  existence  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  body 
upon  the  earth  1  Do  these  signs  identify  that  body  with  the  one 
spoken  of  in  Scripture  ?  Are  they  an  effectual  witness  against  the 
world  ? 


SECTION  L 

BAPTISM. 

That  there  has  existed  for  the  last  1800  years,  a  certain  rite 
called  Baptism  ;  that  it  is  not  derived  from  the  national  customs  of 
any  of  the  people  among  whom  it  is  found ;  that  different  tribes  of 


SIGNS  OF  A  SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


241 


the  most  different  origin  and  character  adopted  it,  and  when  they 
had  received  it  believed  themselves  to  be  members  of  a  common 
society  ;  that  this  society  was  supposed  to  be  connected  with  an 
invisible  world,  and  with  a  certain  worship  and  government ;  that 
an  immense  proportion  of  all  the  children  in  Europe  are  admitted 
very  shortly  after  their  birth  to  the  rite ;  that  it  is  generally  per- 
formed by  a  peculiar  class  of  functionaries — these  are  facts,  which 
it  is  not  necessary  to  establish  by  any  proof.  The  only  question  is 
whether  these  facts  have  a  meaning  and  what  that  meaning  is. 

The  idea  of  the  Scriptures,  so  far  as  we  have  been  able  to  trace 
it,  is  that  Jesus  Christ  came  upon  earth  to  reveal  a  kingdom,  which 
kingdom  is  founded  upon  a  union  established  in  his  person  between 
man  and  God — between  the  visible  and  invisible  world — and  ulti- 
mately upon  a  revelation  of  the  divine  Name.  If  then  the  setting 
up  of  this  kingdom,  and  the  adoption  of  men  into  it,  be  not  connect- 
ed in  the  New  Testament  with  the  rite  of  baptism,  we  may  be  quite 
sure  that  the  fact  we  have  just  noticed,  let  its  import  be  what  it 
may,  does  not  concern  us.  Even  though  baptism  were  enjoined  as 
a  rite  by  our  Lord  himself,  yet  if  it  were  appointed  in  such  terms  as 
leave  us  at  liberty  to  suppose  that  it  was  merely  accidental  to  the 
general  purposes  of  his  advent,  we  cannot  prove  an  identity  be- 
tween the  universal  society  which  acknowledges  it  now  and  the 
one  which  He  founded. 

Let  us  then  turn  to  the  Gospels  that  we  may  see  there  how  far 
this  is  the  case.  One  of  the  first  events  announced  there  is  con- 
tained in  these  words :  "  In  those  days  came  John  the  Baptist, 
preaching  in  the  wilderness  of  Judea  and  saying  :  Repent  ye,  for 
the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand.  Then  went  out  to  him  Jerusa- 
lem and  all  Judea,  and  were  baptized  of  him  in  Jordan  confessing 
their  sins."  This  narrative  is  at  least  singular :  baptism  is  connect- 
ed with  a  spiritual  act,  that  of  repentance ;  with  a  spiritual  promise, 
that  of  remission  ;  with  the  announcement  of  a  kingdom  ;  with  an 
intimation  that  that  kingdom  should  not  merely  be  composed  of  the 
children  of  Abraham.  Supposing  it  were,  as  some  imagine,  a 
ceremony  not  known  until  that  time,  then  it  was  introduced  at  the 
very  moment  that  the  kingdom  of  heaven  was  to  begin ;  supposing 
it  had  been  practised,  as  others  say,  at  the  reception  of  Gentile  con- 
verts to  the  privileges  of  the  outer  court,  then  the  administration  of 

16 


242 


SIGNS  OF  A 


it  to  the  Jews  would  appear  to  be  a  most  significant  intimation 
that  they  were  henceforth  to  take  their  stand  upon  a  universal  hu- 
man ground.  This  baptism  then  was  the  preparation  for  the  gos- 
pel. It  may,  however,  for  aught  that  appears  at  present,  have  been 
only  a  preparation.  But  Jesus  Himself  descends  into  the  water, 
and  as  He  comes  out  of  it,  a  voice  from  heaven  proclaims  Him  the 
well  beloved  Son,  and  the  Spirit  descends  upon  Him  in  a  bodily 
shape.  The  announcement  then  that  the  Divine  man,  the  king  of 
men,  had  really  appeared,  was,  according  to  the  Gospels,  connected 
with  Baptism.  And  this  same  Baptism  they  speak  of  as  the  begin- 
ning of  our  Lord's  public  ministry,  and  of  all  the  acts  by  which  his 
descent  from  above  was  attested.  Yet  this  might  have  been  neces- 
sary to  mark  the  leader ;  it  need  not  have  any  application  to  his 
disciples.  But  Jesus  preached,  saying,  "  Repent,  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  is  at  hand  j"  he  appoints  Apostles  to  go  and  declare  that 
kingdom  ;  and  these  Apostles  baptize.  The  nature  of  their  mes- 
sage may  denote,  however,  that  they  wrere  only  continuing  the  dis- 
pensation of  John,  that  they  had  nothing  directly  to  do  with  that 
higher  Baptism  of  the  Holy  Ghost  and  of  fire,  which  John  had  de- 
clared would  supersede  his  own.  Our  Lord  has  a  conversation  with 
Nicodemus  in  which  He  tells  him  that  he  must  be  born  again  if  he 
would  see  the  kingdom  of  heaven ;  because  that  which  is  born  of 
the  flesh  is  flesh,  and  that  which  is  born  of  the  Spirit  is  spirit ;  be- 
cause it  was  impossible  for  the  fleshly  man  to  understand  even 
earthly  things,  much  more  these  heavenly  things,  which  He  alone 
could  reveal  who  had  come  down  from  heaven,  and  was  in  heaven. 
And  this  declaration  of  the  transcendental  character  of  the  new 
kingdom  is  joined  to  the  words,  "Except  a  man  be  born  of  water 
and  of  the  Spirit,  he  cannot  enter  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven." 
Yet  perhaps,  even  here  there  may  be  a  reference  rather  to  the  spi- 
ritual eye  in  man,  which  this  ordinance,  like  those  earlier  ordinan- 
ces of  the  Jews,  might  be  the  means  of  opening,  than  to  the  actual 
gift  of  God's  Spirit  which  was  promised ;  for  it  is  said  expressly, 
"  The  Spirit  was  not  yet  given,  because  that  Jesus  was  not  yet 
glorified."  Our  Lord  appears  to  his  disciples  after  He  had  risen 
from  the  dead,  and  He  says, "  All  power  is  given  unto  me  in  heaven 
and  earth,  go  therefore,  and  preach  the  gospel  to  all  nations,  baptiz- 
ing them  in  the  name  of  the  Father,  and  of  the  Son,  and  of  the  Holy 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  243 

Ghost."  This  language  is  certainly  strange;  for  it  seems  as  if  it  could 
only  look  forward  to  the  establishment  of  a  spiritual  kingdom.  But  one 
other  point  of  evidence  is  still  wanting.  Did  the  Apostles,  after  the 
glorification  of  Christ,  after  the  descent  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  still  bap- 
tize with  water  ?  St.  Peter  stood  in  the  midst  of  the  disciples,  and  said 
to  the  Jews, "  God  hath  made  this  Jesus  whom  ye  crucified,  both  Lord 
and  Christ ;  repent  therefore,  and  be  baptized  and  ye  shall  receive  the 
gift  of  the  Holy  Ghost and  the  same  day  three  thousand  were 
baptized.  This  evidence  may  perhaps  be  enough  to  show  that  the 
writers  of  the  Gospels  and  of  the  Acts,  believed  this  to  be  the  sign 
of  admission  into  Christ's  spiritual  and  universal  kingdom,  and  con- 
sequently, that  every  person  receiving  that  sign  was,  ipso  facto,  a 
member  of  that  kingdom.  As  the  son  or  servant  of  the  Roman 
commonwealth  entered  so  soon  as  he  was  manumitted  upon  the 
rights  of  a  citizen,  as  all  immunities  and  responsibilities  appertain- 
ing to  this  character  from  that  hour  became  his,  the  young  Chris- 
tian convert  who  had  derived  his  instruction  from  the  Scriptures 
could  not  doubt,  that  from  the  time  of  his  baptism  he  was  free  of 
that  brotherhood  of  which  his  Lord  was  the  head.  He  could  not 
doubt  that  whatever  language,  be  it  as  lofty  as  it  might,  described 
that  brotherhood,  described  his  state ;  that  if  Christ  came  to  make 
men  sons  of  God,  he  was  a  son  of  God  ;  if  He  came  to  make  them 
members  of  his  own  body,  he  was  a  member  of  that  body ;  if  He 
came  to  endue  men  with  his  Spirit,  that  Spirit  was  given  to  him. 
His  baptism  said  to  him,  This  is  your  position ;  according  to  the 
conditions  of  it  you  are  to  live.  It  will  not  be  an  easy  life.  It  will 
be  one  of  perpetual  conflict.  You  will  have  a  battle  not  with  flesh 
and  blood  only,  but  with  principalities  and  powers,  with  the  rulers 
of  spiritual  wickedness  in  high  places.  But  understand  the  nature 
of  the  battle.  Your  foes  are  not  hindering  you  from  obtaining  a 
blessing ;  they  are  hindering  you  from  entering  into  the  fruition  of 
one  that  has  been  obtained  for  you  ;  they  will  laugh  at  you  for 
pretending  that  it  is  yours;  they  will  tell  you  that  you  must  not 
claim  it  But  in  the  strength  of  this  covenant  you  must  claim  it ; 
otherwise  your  life  will  be  a  lie.  I  ask  any  one  calmly  to  read  the 
Epistles,  and  tell  me  whether  any  other  sense  than  this  could  be  put 
upon  baptism  by  those  who  exhorted  men,  because  they  were  bap- 
tized, to  count  themselves  dead  unto  sin  and  alive  unto  God ;  by 


U4A  SIGNS  OF  A 

those  who  addressed  men,  the  majority  of  whom  they  did  not  know 
personally,  some  of  whom  they  did  know  to  be  inconsistent  and  un- 
holy, as  being  in  Christ,  elect,  children  of  God;  by  those  who  con- 
jured their  disciples  not  to  doubt,  not  to  disbelieve,  that  they  had 
been  admitted  into  the  communion  of  saints,  and  told  them  they 
would  sink  into  apostasy  if  they  did  ?  But  then  I  must  ask  also, 
why,  if  the  kingdom  of  Christ  was  declared  to  be  an  everlasting 
kingdom,  and  this  sign  was  fixed  as  the  admission  of  men  into  it  at 
the  first,  and  this  sign  still  exists  among  us,  all  we  who  have  re- 
ceived it  are  not  in  the  same  position,  have  not  the  same  privileges, 
are  not  under  the  same  responsibilities,  as  those  who  lived  eighteen 
hundred  years  ago  ?  I  ask  whether  Baptism  be  not  the  sign  of  a 
spiritual  and  universal  kingdom  ? 

objections. — I.  The  Quaker. 

To  this  question  various  answers  are  given.  I  will  consider 
first  that  of  the  Quakers. 

I.  It  seems  to  them  utterly  incredible  and  monstrous,  that  a 
spiritual  fact  or  operation  should  be  denoted  by  a  visible  sign. 
"  Either  men  are  livingly  united  to  the  Divine  Word,  or  they  are 
not ;  if  they  are  the  sign  is  useless  ;  if  they  are  not,  it  is  false.  If 
Christ's  kingdom  depend  upon  these  outward  ceremonies,  wherein 
does  it  differ  from  the  Jewish  ?  What  do  the  words,  that  John 
came  baptizing  with  water  but  Christ  with  the  Spirit  and  fire, 
mean,  if  both  baptisms  are  equally  outward  V9 

Positions  of  this  kind  are  so  self-evident  to  the  Quaker,  that 
Scripture  cannot  be  suffered  to  contradict  them.  It  is  in  vain  to 
allege  texts  and  commandments.  These  are  primary  truths  which 
ride  over  them  all,  and  determine  the  interpretation  of  them.  If 
the  Apostles  did  act  in  opposition  to  them,  the  Apostles  showed 
that  they  were  still  ignorant  and  Judaical.  Be  it  so — if  these  notions 
are  good  for  any  thing,  if  they  do  not  contradict  the  leading  posi- 
tive truths  of  Quakerism,  let  them  be  upholden  at  all  risks.  But 
that  is  the  point  I  wish  to  examine. 

We  have  seen  that  Fox  did  not  consider  it  the  work  of  the 
Gospel  to  reveal  the  fact  of  men's  relation  to  the  Divine  Word; 
that  fact,  he  believed,  was  intimated  both  to  Heathens  and  to 
Jews.    To  the  latter  it  was  intimated  by  a  sign.    The  Invisible 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


245 


Teacher  by  this  means  declared  to  the  children  of  Abraham  that 
there  was  a  union  between  themselves  and  Him,  warned  them 
of  the  tendency  there  was  in  their  fleshly  natures  to  separate  from 
Him,  promised  to  uphold  them  against  that  tendency. 

This,  I  say,  Fox  acknowledged  to  be  the  divine  method  in  the 
Jewish  dispensation.  He  never  pretended  that  the  union  which 
was  made  known  to  the  Jew  was  a  material  union ;  if  it  had 
been,  there  would  have  been  no  sign,  for  there  would  have  been 
nothing  to  signify.  He  never  pretended  that  it  was  a  variable 
union,  deriving  its  existence  from  certain  feelings  in  the  minds  of  the 
human  creatures  who  shared  in  it;  if  it  had  been  there  could  have 
been  no  sign,  for  the  thing  to  be  signified  would  have  been  differ- 
ent each  day.  So  that  the  appropriateness — the  possibility,  if  I 
may  so  speak,  of  this  method,  arose  from  the  fact  that  a  certain 
spiritual  and  permanent  relation  was  to  be  made  known  by  it. 
And  yet  the  reason,  according  to  the  Quaker,  why  this  method 
should  be  abandoned,  is  this  and  this  only,  that  the  dispensation  of 
the  Gospel  has  a  spiritual  and  permanent,  not  a  material  and 
transitory,  character !  Surely  this  is  an  inconsistency  which  needs 
to  be  justified  by  something  else  than  vague  declamations  about 
carnal  practices,  and  angry  denunciations  against  the  whole  of 
Christendom,  from  the  Apostles  downwards,  for  being  guilty  of  them. 

"  But  it  is  a  false  thing  to  give  the  sign  to  any  one  who  has 
not  the  reality."  What  is  meant  by  the  words,  has  not  the  reality? 
Is  it  meant  that  the  relation  is  not  real?  If  so,  Fox  was  wrong, 
for  he  affirmed  that  it  was  leal,  for  all  men.  Or  does  the  word 
real  refer  to  the  feeling  and  acknowledgment  of  the  relation? 
Then  this  proposition  affirms,  that  it  is  false  to  tell  a  man  a  truth 
because  he  does  not  believe  it.  Unquestionably  we  are  guilty  of 
that  falsehood ;  the  whole  Old  Testament  dispensation  was  also 
guilty  of  it ;  Fox  and  the  Quakers  themselves  are  guilty  of  it. 

"  But  the  sign  is  useless  to  a  man  who  is  truly  united  to  the 
Divine  Word."  There  are  two  opinions  implied  in  this  language, 
both  of  great  importance,  both  very  illustrative  of  Quaker  feeling 
and  history.  One  is  that  it  is  nothing  to  a  man  that  a  thing  is 
true,  true  in  itself,  true  universally,  provided  he  feels  it  to  be  true 
for  him  ;  the  other  is  that  union  with  the  Divine  Word  is  all  which 
men  require.    Now  every  earnest  word  which  Fox  spoke  was  a 


246 


SIGNS  OF  A 


testimony  against  both  these  notions ;  first,  (as  I  have  shown  so 
often,)  the  truth  of  the  thing  was  the  ground  upon  which  he  exhorted 
men  to  place  their  feeling  of  it ;  secondly,  he  declared  that  union 
to  the  Divine  Word  did  not  satisfy  those  Heathens  or  Jews  who 
perceived  it,  but  that  it  made  them  long  for  something  more,  for  a 
kingdom  of  Heaven.  See  here  an  evidence  for  Baptism,  which  all 
the  history  of  Christendom  could  not  have  afforded,  frankly  offered 
to  us  by  those  who  reject  it.  Their  whole  preaching  is  against 
Judaism,  against  the  old  covenant ;  and  yet  they  are  thrown  back 
upon  Judaism,  they  cannot  rise  above  the  great  doctrine  of  the  old 
covenant.  But  neither  can  they  keep  that  doctrine ;  they  cannot 
keep  the  faith  that  we  are  related  to  the  Divine  Word;  they 
can  only  substitute  for  it  certain  individual  feelings  and  impres- 
sions. 

And  now,  having  this  thought  on  our  minds,  let  us  compare 
for  an  instant  our  interpretation  of  the  words  of  John  the  Baptist 
with  theirs.  WTe  say  that  John  came  baptizing  with  water  unto 
repentance,  for  the  remission  of  sins.  Here  lay  the  spiritual  mean- 
ing of  his  Baptism.  Our  Lord's  baptism,  we  maintain,  includes 
this  meaning,  but  it  has  a  deeper  one.  His  baptism  is  not  only 
unto  repentance ;  not  only  intimates  that  the  heart  has  turned  to 
God,  and  so  turning  is  delivered  from  sin  :  it  gives  the  spirit  and 
power  whence  repentance  and  every  other  right  act  must  flow  ; 
it  brings  the  subject  of  it  under  the  discipline  of  that  purifying  fire 
whereby  the  old  and  evil  nature  is  to  be  consumed.  This  mean- 
ing of  the  passage  seems  to  be  literal  enough,  and  it  precisely  ac- 
cords with  the  promises  and  anticipations  of  the  prophets,  with  the 
expositions  and  retrospections  of  the  Apostles.  How  does  the 
Quaker  improve  upon  it  ?  He  makes  it  the  great  characteristic  of 
John,  that  he  did  baptize  with  water,  and  of  Christ,  that  He  would 
not  baptize  with  water.  So  that  the  voice  crying  in  the  wilder- 
ness said  this,  "  Hear,  oh  Israel !  rejoice,  oh  ye  Gentiles !  the 
glorious  time  is  at  hand,  which  your  fathers  expected,  which  the 
whole  universe  has  been  groaning  for — the  time  when  signs  are  to 
be  abolished.  The  great  Prince  and  Deliverer  is  at  hand,  who 
will  cause  that  the  things  of  earth  shall  be  no  longer  pledges  and 
sacraments  of  a  union  with  Heaven  !  This  is  the  consummation 
of  all  the  hopes  of  mankind,  this  is  what  is  meant  by  the  Taber- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


247 


nacle  of  God  being  with  men;  by  his  dwelling  with  them,  and 
their  being  his  people,  and  his  being  their  God." 

2.    The  Jlnti-pcedobaptist. 

II.  The  Anti-paedobaptist  is,  in  many  respects,  strongly  con- 
trasted with  the  Quaker.  He  attaches  a  very  great  value  to  the 
baptismal  sign.  He  believes  that  it  is  intended  to  be  the  witness 
of  a  spiritual  kingdom.  In  general,  he  is  remarkable  for  holding 
the  belief  firmly,  in  which  the  Quaker  is  deficient,  that  men  are 
chosen  by  God  to  their  place  in  the  Divine  Economy.  But  he  con- 
ceives that  the  admission  of  those  who  have  no  spiritual  conscious- 
ness or  spiritual  capacity  to  this  ordinance,  is  destructive  of  its 
meaning  ;  as  it  exists  in  modern  Europe  it  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  Kingdom  of  Christ. 

I  should  be  very  careful  to  answer  this  objection,  for  it  certainly 
affects  the  whole  of  my  argument,  if  it  had  not  been  already  so 
fully  considered.  The  issue  to  be  tried  between  us  and  the  Ana- 
baptists is  not  whether  the  existence  of  such  and  such  a  sign  in- 
dicates the  existence  of  a  kingdom,  but  what  that  kingdom  is  which 
it  should  indicate.  I  have  maintained,  upon  the  authority  of  Scrip- 
ture, that  the  Catholic  Church  is  emphatically  a  kingdom  for  man- 
kind, a  kingdom  grounded  upon  the  union  which  has  been  estab- 
lished in  Christ  between  God  and  man.  I  have  maintained  that  it 
grew  out  of  a  family  and  a  nation,  of  which  social  states  it  proved 
itself  to  be  the  proper  and  only  foundation.  Supposing  this  notion 
to  be  altogether  false,  it  may  be  most  reasonable  to  say,  that  a 
child,  an  embryo  man,  ought  to  be  treated  as  if  he  were  not  a  citizen 
of  this  kingdom.  To  one  who  believes  it  true,  such  a  doctrine  must 
seem  absolutely  monstrous.  Let  us  take  a  member  of  either  of  the 
classes  out  of  which  the  early  Church  was  formed.  First  let  him 
be  a  Heathen.  He  has  been  struck  with  the  threatenings  of  coming 
judgments  which  were  visible  in  the  sins  of  the  Roman  empire,  in  the 
divorces,  adulteries,  incests,  parricides  of  its  most  conspicuous  mem- 
bers. He  has  felt  how  little  the  idea  of  the  gods  which  was  re- 
ceived among  his  countrymen,  tended  to  repress  such  atrocities. 
The  preaching  of  some  Christian  Apostle  has  awakened  him  to  the 
fact,  that  the  evil  nature  from  which  all  these  crimes  have  proceed- 
ed is  in  himself.   He  hears  of  a  deliverance  out  of  that  nature.  He 


248 


SIGNS  OF  A 


hears  that  God  has  revealed  himself  to  men  as  the  enemy  of  all 
unrighteousness  ;  that  He  has  also  revealed  himself  to  men  as  their 
Father;  that  his  Son  has  come  down  to  dwell  among  men  ;  that 
He  has  made  himself  the  brother  of  our  race ;  that  He  has  claimed 
the  members  of  it  for  members  of  his  own  body  ;  that  He  has  given 
them  a  sign  of  admission  into  it;  that  He  has  promised  them  his 
Spirit.  Could  he  who  received  this  joyful  message,  and  acted  upon 
the  command  which  was  involved  in  it,  doubt  that  he  was  received 
into  the  true  human  family,  that  he  was  taken  out  of  a  hateful, 
anomalous,  inhuman  world  ?  Could  he  then  dare  to  say,  "  This 
child  whom  I  have  begotten,  belongs  to  this  inhuman  anomalous 
world;  he  has  a  human  form  and  countenance — that  form  and 
countenance  which  Christ  bore — yet  the  accursed  nature  which  I 
have  renounced  is  his  proper,  his  appointed  master ;  the  evil  society 
out  of  which  I  have  fled,  is  his  home ;  to  the  evil  spirit  who  I  be- 
lieve has  infused  his  leaven  into  that  nature  and  that  society,  I  leave 
him."  I  am  now  reasoning  with  a  person  who  does  not  attach 
any  high  meaning  to  Baptism,  but  with  one  who  believes  it  to  be 
really  the  sign  of  the  redeemed  covenant  family.  I  ask  such  a 
person  to  consider,  what  less  than  this  a  Christian  convert  could 
suppose  to  be  signified,  by  any  one  who  told  him  that  he  was  not 
to  baptize  his  child,  because  he  could  not  be  sure  that  it  was  in- 
cluded in  Christ's  redemption  ? 

Nor  let  it  be  supposed  that  this  is  the  whole  of  the  contradiction 
which  such  a  prohibition  would  involve.  Far  from  it.  The  idea 
of  the  Gospel,  as  the  revelation  of  truths  which  are  expressed  in 
the  forms  of  family  society,  and  which,  to  all  appearance,  are  not 
expressible  in.  any  other  forms,  truths  to  the  apprehension  of  which 
he  had  risen  through  the  feelings,  which  his  domestic  relations  or  the 
consciousness  of  their  violation  had  called  forth,  would  seem  to  him 
utterly  destroyed,  all  links  between  human  relations  and  divine  at 
once  abolished,  if  he  might  not  dare  to  speak  of  his  child  as  united 
to  him  in  a  spiritual  bond.  Again,  the  idea  of  the  Gospel,  as  the 
promise  of  a  Spirit  who  would  awaken  all  consciousnesses,  convic- 
tions, and  affections,  would  be  equally  trifled  with,  by  the  doctrine 
that  the  existence  of  these  convictions,  consciousnesses,  affections, 
was  the  condition  precedent  to  an  admission  into  the  Gospel 
Covenant. 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


249 


On  this  last  point,  the  perplexities  of  a  Hebrew  Christian,  who 
was  commanded  not  to  baptize  his  child,  must  have  been  still  more 
distressing.  His  own  covenant  had  been  emphatically  with  chil- 
dren. That  which  had  superseded  it  was,  in  all  other  respects, 
wider,  freer,  more  directly  referring  all  acts  of  the  creature  to  the 
love  and  good  pleasure  of  the  Creator.  Yet,  without  one  word  of 
Christ  being  produced  to  this  effect,  J  command  you  not  to  follow 
the  analogy  of  God's  earlier  dispensation,  not  to  suppose  that,in  my 
kingdom  of  grace,  infants  are  accounted  human  and  moral  beings 
as  they  were  under  the  law — without  the  record  of  one  sentence  to 
this  purpose ;  with  the  record  of  many  acts  and  words  which  led 
to  just  the  opposite  conclusion,  that  infants  were  a  most  honoured 
part  of  that  race  which  He  came  to  seek  and  save;  with  the  doc- 
trine forming  an  article  of  his  daily  confession,  that  the  Redeemer 
of  humanity  had  himself  entered  into  the  state  of  childhood,  as  w7ell 
as  into  that  of  manhood,  the  Israelite  convert  is  forced  to  abandon 
all  the  habits  of  thought  and  feeling  which  he  had  derived  from 
God's  own  teaching,  not  because  they  were  too  narrow,  but  be- 
cause they  were  too  comprehensive  for  his  new  position. 

The  Anti-paedobaptist  then,  I  think,  cannot  plead,  (and  this  is 
his  only  plea,)  that  the  application  of  Baptism  to  infants  is  a  strange 
and  perplexing  departure  from  the  admitted  sense  and  object  of  the 
ordinance.  On  the  contrary,  there  is  some  reason,  I  fancy,  for 
suspecting  danger  on  the  other  side.  It  was  so  reasonable,  so  in- 
evitable a  consequence  of  the  baptismal  principle,  that  infants 
should  be  received  into  the  Church — the  law  of  the  Church's  pro- 
pagation was  thereby  so  clearly  explained  and  reconciled  with  the 
ordinary  laws  of  God's  Providence — that  it  would  be  no  wonder  if 
liier  truth,  equally  necessary,  were  lost  sight  of  in  the  eagerness 
to  enforce  that  which  this  practice  inculcated.  It  might  be  for- 
gotten that  we  baptize  children,  not  because  they  are  children,  but 
because  they  are  embryo  men  ;  that  to  the  complete  idea  of  a 
spiritual  blessing,  a  receiver  is  needful  as  well  as  a  giver ;  that 
Baptism  is  not  a  momentary  act  but  a  perpetual  sacrament.  Be- 
fore I  finish  this  section,  I  may  have  occasion  to  show  that  some  or 
all  of  these  errors  have  arisen  in  the  Church,  and  to  their  prevalen- 
cy  the  rise  of  a  sect  of  Anti-paedobaptists  is,  no  doubt,  to  be  attri- 
buted.   But  there  is  found,  side  by  side  with  Baptism,  in  all  the 


250 


SIGNS  OF  A 


countries  where  it  is  adopted,  an  institution  which  is  a  far  more 
complete  testimony  against  such  perversions,  than  those  have  been 
able  to  bear  who  set  aside  the  principle  out  of  which  they  have 
grown.  This  institution,  not  displacing  or  superseding  Baptism, 
but  confirming,  as  its  name  denotes,  the  authority  and  pledges  of 
that  sacrament,  declares  to  the  child  that  He  who  has  guided  it 
through  infancy  will  be  with  it  in  the  conscious  struggles  of  man- 
hood, and  that  it  has  been  made  free,  not  only  of  a  particular  con- 
gregation, but  of  the  Universal  Church. 

The  doctrine  of  the  Anabaptists  then,  like  that  of  the  Quakers, 
supplies  a  strong  argument  in  favour  of  my  position,  for  it  shows 
that  just  so  far  as  the  operation  of  Baptism  is  restricted,  just  so  far 
does  the  belief  of  a  human  society  become  impossible.* 

3.    The  Modern  Protestant. 

Next  to  the  Anabaptist  comes  the  soi-disant  disciple  of  Luther 
and  Calvin,  the  modern  Protestant  or  Evangelical.    His  doctrine 

*  As  the  notion  that  the  Baptism  now  existing  in  Christendom  is  in- 
valid, because  it  is  generally  performed  by  sprinkling,  and  not  by  immersion, 
is  accidentally  connected  with  the  Anti-psedobaptist  theory,  it  may  be  well 
to  say  a  few  words  upon  it  in  this  place.  14  The  practice,"  it  is  said,  "of 
the  early  ages,  so  far  as  we  can  ascertain,  was  to  immerse  ;  the  emblematical 
character  of  Baptism  as  a  burial  is  destroyed  by  the  other  practice  ;  if  we 
admit  an  outward  ceremony  at  all,  we  cannot  afterwards  pretend  that  the 
mode  of  performing  it  is  indifferent. "  I  acknowledge  that  there  is  truth  in 
each  of  these  propositions.  I  admit  (with,  I  suppose,  the  majority  of  Church- 
men) that  there  is  a  high  probability  in  favour  of  the  prevalence  in  early 
times  of  that  practice  which  is  least  likely  to  have  been  afterwards  intro- 
duced, and  that  most  of  the  facts  we  know  would  confirm  the  opinion.  I 
admit  that  the  word  "  buried  with  him,"  in  the  sixth  chapter  of  the  Romans, 
is  a  better  argument  for  immersion,  than  the  words  "  sprinkled  from  an  evil 
conscience,"  in  St.  Peter,  can  ever  furnish  for  the  modern  custom.  I  admit, 
that  having  received  a  certain  form  and  not  another,  as  the  sign  of  a  certain 
thing,  we  have  no  business  to  give  ourselves  airs  about  the  unimportance  of 
certain  particulars  of  that  which  has  been  prescribed.  But  here  lies  the  dis- 
tinction. No  particular  mode  of  baptism  is  prescribed  by  our  Lord.  It  is  said, 
you  shall  make  water  the  sign  ;  and  you  shall  accompany  the  use  of  this 
water  with  certain  words.  It  is  not  said,  Thus  shall  you  use  it,  and  in  no 
other  way.  Now  the  highest  probability,  that  a  practice  now  existing  is 
different  from  one  formerly  existing,  does  not,  I  contend,  make  that  practice 
illegitimate,  if  it  answer  to  the  terms  of  the  law  which  ordained  it.  And  this 
rule  applies  especially  to  the  case  of  a  Universal  Institution  ;  we  cannot  tell 
that  the  old  practice,  however  laudable  and  right,  may  not  have  been  deter- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  251 

is  that  there  are  two  kingdoms  of  Christ,  one  real  and  spiritual, 
the  other  outward  and  visible.    It  is  highly  desirable,  perhaps 

mined  by  the  circumstances  of  a  particular  country  or  time  ;  we  cannot  tell 
that  the  liberty  of  modal  alteration  may  not  have  been  contemplated  and 
provided  for  in  the  terms  of  the  enactment.  A  sign  which  is  divinely  insti- 
tuted and  meant  for  mankind,  is  too  serious  a  thing  to  be  determined  by  any 
guesses  or  judgments  about  antiquity.  They  may  be  most  useful  as  sugges- 
tions, they  may  unfold  to  us  meanings  which  we  have  lost  ;  they  cannot  be 
produced  as  condemnatory  of  that,  which  he  who  appointed  the  sign  has  not 
condemned.  Least  of  all  must  the  notion  intrude  itself,  that  such  or  such  a 
sign  is  not  big  enough,  does  not  involve  self-sacrifice  enough  ;  for  this  is  to 
set  aside  the  first  principle  upon  which  the  validity  of  all  signs  must  rest, 
that  the  one,  be  it  great  or  little,  which  the  Ruler  has  fixed,  is  the  right  one, 
and  must  denote  what  He  meant  it  to  denote. 

What  I  have  said,  I  hope  is  sufficiently  plain.  If  not,  the  case  of  the  ring 
in  marriage  may  illustrate  it.  Supposing  a  ring  to  be  prescribed  by  any  law 
in  virtue  of  which  marriages  are  performed,  a  ring  is  indispensable.  But  the 
strongest  evidence  to  prove  that  rings  at  weddings  had  been  commonly  of 
gold,  and  the  absence  of  all  evidence  to  prove  that  they  had  been  any  thing 
else,  ought  not  to  be  sufficient  to  make  a  marriage  void,  which  was  concluded 
with  some  ring.  And  this  example  suggests  an  observation  in  reference  to 
the  alleged  loss  of  the  baptismal  emblem,  by  the  use  of  sprinkling.  Suppos- 
ing it  were  urged  by  one,  who  was  impeaching  the  validity  of  a  marriage 
which  was  celebrated  with  a  brass  or  copper  ring,  that  some  notion  of  purity 
was  implied  in  the  choice  of  the  nobler  metal  ;  nay,  supposing  he  were  able 
to  produce  clear  proof  that  that  notion  had  been  attached  to  it,  had  even 
given  occasion  to  the  custom — a  judge  would  surely  not  listen  for  an  instant 
to  such  an  argument  ;  though  he  would  admit,  in  the  strongest  manner,  that 
the  idea  of  marriage  implied  purity,  and  that  it  was  the  object  of  all  marriage 
institutions  and  ceremonies  to  preserve  it.  He  would  at  once  declare  that 
the  emblem,  however  interesting,  however  useful  for  personal  meditation, 
however  law-ful  as  the  foundation  of  a  custom,  was  altogether  distinct  from 
the  sign.  The  prescribed  sign  testified  that  the  union  betwreen  the  parties 
was  complete  and  final  ;  a  purely  arbitrary  sign,  having  no  emblematic  value, 
would  do  this  ;  and  the  force  of  it  as  arbitrary,  as  appointed,  must  not  be  lost 
through  any  consideration  of  its  wisdom  or  propriety.  This  reflection  is 
especially  needful  in  the  present  case.  An  institution  of  divine  appointment 
will  necessarily  carry  in  it  a  profound  wisdom,  and  manifold  adaptations  to 
the  condition  of  the  creatures  for  whom  it  is  destined.  Such  a  symbol  as 
water  at  once  suggests  numerous  hints  and  analogies,  and  many  more  pre- 
sent themselves  to  an  earnest,  even  though  he  be  not  a  fanciful,  thinker.  But 
the  main  fact  to  which  Baptism  bears  witness,  our  adoption  into  Christ,  must 
be,  after  all,  the  key  to  these  analogies,  and  not  they  the  keys  to  it.  And 
that  adoption  into  Christ  must  be  received  as  a  fact,  upon  the  authority  of 
the  sign,  without  the  least  reference  to  any  apparent  likeness  in  it  to  the 
thing  signified  ;  else  the  sign  will  lose  its  universality,  and  be  treated  as 


252 


SIGNS  OF  A 


necessary,  that  young  as  well  as  old  should  be  admitted  into  the 
latter.  Baptism  is  the  appointed  mode  of  admission.  "What  are 
the  privileges  of  the  Gentile  court  into  which,  by  this  ordinance, 
we  are  received,  they  do  not  precisely  determine.  Possibly  some 
grace  is  communicated  at  Baptism ;  or  if  not,  the  blessings  of 
being  permitted  to  hear  preaching,  and  of  obtaining  a  Christian 
education,  are  great,  and  may  be  turned  to  greater  use  hereafter. 
But  the  important  point  of  all  is  this,  to  press  upon  men  that  till 
they  have  been  actually  and  consciously  converted,  they  are  not 
members  of  Christ  or  children  of  God.  Some  disciples  of  this 
school  believe  that  these  words  may  be  applied  to  baptized  people 
in  a  sense  ;  but  if  you  desire  to  know  in  what  sense,  the  answers 
are  so  vague  and  indeterminate,  as  to  leave  a  painful  impression 
upon  the  mind,  that  such  language  is  very  awful  and  significant, 
and  yet  that  it  may  on  certain  occasions  be  sported  with  or  used 
with  a  secret  reservation. 

But  those  who  make  these  statements  say,  that  they  wish  to 
get  rid  of  equivocations,  not  to  invent  them.  They  resort  to  this 
hypothesis  of  a  double  kingdom,  because  the  plainest  observation 
tells  them,  that  a  baptized  man  may  be  a  very  evil  man,  and  be- 
cause, being  evil,  they  cannot  see  what  he  has  to  do  with  a  king- 
dom of  righteousness,  peace,  and  joy  in  the  Holy  Ghost.  Again, 
they  say,  "  Let  people  make  out  what  theological  scheme  they 
please,  we  know  that  we,  having  been  baptized  in  infancy,  did  in 
manhood  as  much  pass  from  death  unto  life,  as  any  heathen  in  the 
first  age  could  have  done."  It  is  not,  they  contend,  fair  or  honest 
to  suppress  either  of  these  facts,  either  that  which  is  obvious  to 
every  man's  common  sense,  or  that  of  which  they  themselves  are 
conscious ;  but  that  this  is  done,  and  must  be  done,  if  we  assume 

nothing  to  those  who  cannot,  through  deficiency  in  the  faculty  of  comparison, 
or  any  other  cause,  discover  the  resemblance. 

These  remarks  are  merely  intended  to  show,  that  there  is  no  warrant  for 
the  notion  that  the  Baptism  now  existing  among  us,  is  not  formally  the  bap- 
tism which  Christ  ordained,  and  therefore  the  sign  of  admission  into  his  uni- 
versal and  spiritual  kingdom,  because  the  mode  of  administering  it  may  not 
be  that  which  his  Apostles  practised.  The  question  whether  any  power  and 
what  power  has  a  right  to  prescribe  for  the  whole  Church,  or  for  any  parti- 
cular branch  of  it,  a  certain  mode  of  performing  Baptism,  is  quite  a  distinct 
one.  which  must  be  considered  in  its  proper  place. 


I 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  253 

Baptism  to  be  what  it  is  sometimes  called — A  New  Birth — the 
actual  introduction  into  a  spiritual  wTorld. 

Now  I  feel  as  little  disposed  to  deny  the  melancholy  propo- 
sition that  Christian  men  are  not  living  Christian  lives,  as  the 
Jewish  prophet  felt  to  pass  over  the  truth,  that  the  name  of  God 
was  blasphemed  through  his  countrymen  in  all  lands.  The  prece- 
dents which  Holy  Scripture  furnishes  I  believe  to  be  strictly  appli- 
cable to  us ;  that  which  was  the  function  of  the  preacher  then  is 
his  function  now  ;  if  he  who  prophesied  in  Jerusalem  was  to  re- 
buke men  for  sin,  and  to  call  them  to  repentance,  we  in  London 
or  Paris  are  to  do  the  like.  The  question  is,  What  is  the  sin  which 
we  are  to  rebuke,  what  is  the  repentance  to  which  wTe  are  to  in- 
vite 1  The  Jewish  prophet  charged  his  people  %ith  forgetting  the 
covenant  of  their  God.  He  traced  up  all  sins  to  this  sin.  He  said 
that  the  Jew  was  guilty,  because  he  did  not  claim  the  privilege  of 
a  Jew,  because  he  did  not  act  as  if  he  was  a  Jew.  Are  we  to  fol- 
low this  precedent  or  not?  Are  wre  following  it  when  we  say, 
"  This  covenant  is,  I  will  be  to  you  a  father,  and  you  shall  be  to  me 
sons  and  daughters ;  you  are  acting  as  if  you  were  not  in  this 
covenant,  you  are  forgetting  it,"  or  when  we  say,  "  These  titles 
are  not  yours,  or  are  yours  only  in  some  formal  imaginary  sense,'' 
that  is,  if  we  spoke  plain  English,  in  no  sense  at  all  ? 

As  little  do  I  desire  to  deny  or  explain  away  the  other  assertion, 
that  baptized  men,  who  have  lived  without  God  in  the  world,  are 
converted  to  Him  by  his  grace.  This  is  a  doctrine  which  I  believe 
was  held  as  strongly  by  St.  Bernard,  Thauler,  and  A  Kempis,  I 
might  add  by  Loyola  and  Xavier,  as  by  any  modern  Methodist. 
These  eminent  persons  did  not  limit  their  language  to  cases  of  open 
profligacy  (though  they  by  no  means  excluded  such  cases);  they 
applied  it  to  laymen  or  priests,  who  under  a  respectable  exterior 
had  sought  the  praise  of  men  more  than  the  praise  of  God.  Whether 
we  have  a  right  to  restrict  the  word  to  a  particular  act  or  crisis ; 
whether  every  act  of  repentance  is  not  one  of  conversion  or  turning 
to  God ;  whether  we  are  not  apt  to  forget  that  every  such  act 
must  be  as  much  attributed  to  the  Spirit  of  God  as  the  recovery 
from  habitual  thoughtlessness  and  sin,  are  questions  for  serious  re- 
flection ;  but  the  decision  of  them  does  not  affect  the  opinion,  that 
there  may  be  an  entire  change  in  the  feelings  and  aims  of  one  who 


254  SIGNS  OF  A 

has  received  Christian  Baptism.  But  by  what  words  is  such  a  re- 
volution to  be  denoted  ?  I  believe  the  answer  may  be  obtained, 
by  comparing  different  approved  records  of  conversions.  We 
shall  find  a  great  difference  in  them.  In  some  we  shall  hear  a 
man  speaking  with  great  horror  and  loathing  of  his  past  years  and 
of  his  youthful  companions.  We  shall  hear  another  transferring 
these  expressions  of  loathing  to  his  evil  nature,  and  to  himself  for 
having  yielded  to  it,  manifesting  the  deepest  affection  for  all  he 
has  ever  been  acquainted  with,  owning  them  to  be  more  righteous 
than  himself,  believing  that  God  cares  for  them  as  well  as  for  him 
— certain  that  what  is  true  for  him,  is  true  also  for  them.  The  first 
talks  much  of  the  new  start  he  has  taken,  of  his  new  heart,  of  his 
purified  affections  ^the  latter  rejoices  that  having  discovered  the 
feebleness  of  his  own  heart,  he  has  been  led  to  see  that  there  is 
another  in  whom  he  ought  to  have  trusted  before,  and  may  trust 
now.  The  first  speaks  of  the  grace  that  has  been  bestowed  ^ipon 
himself ;  the  other  of  being  taken  under  the  gracious  guidance  of 
a  Spirit,  whom  he  has  resisted  too  long.  Granting  that  these 
modes  of  expression  may  be  sometimes  intermingled,  that  there 
may  be  a  true  feeling  in  those  who  chiefly  use  the  former,  and  that 
there  may  be  error  and  confusions  in  those  records  wherein  the 
latter  predominate,  yet  does  not  every  one  recognise  a  character- 
istic, a  most  practical  difference  between  them  1  Would  not  any 
experienced  person  of  the  Evangelical  school  feel,  that  the  one 
kind  of  language  indicated  a  much  more  healthful,  genuine,  state 
of  character  than  the  other  ?  But  then  ought  he  not  to  ask  him- 
self whether  both  of  these  kinds  of  language  are  incompatible  with 
the  idea  of  Baptismal  regeneration,  or  only  one  of  them ;  and  if 
only  one,  whether  the  false  or  the  true  ?  If  the  words,  "  then  I 
was  awakened,"  do  not  imply  "  I  had  been  asleep if  the  words, 
"  then  I  came  to  the  knowledge  of  the  truth,"  do  not  imply  "  that 
which  I  knew  was  true  before  I  knew  it;"  if  the  words,  "I 
ceased  to  strive  against  the  Spirit,"  do  not  imply  "  that  there  had 
been  a  previous  resistance  to  the  Spirit,"  they  are  mere  cant 
words,  good  for  nothing,  nay,  utterly  detestable.  But,  if  they  do 
imply  all  this,  they  imply  just  what  the  believer  in  Baptismal  Re- 
generation is  charged  with  fiction  and  falsehood  for  maintain- 
ing.   They  presume  the  existence  of  a  state,  which  is  our  state, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  255 

whether  we  are  conscious  of  it,  whether  we  are  in  conformity  with 
it,  or  no. 

It  is  then  not  necessary  for  the  vindication  of  these  two  facts, 
that  we  should  adopt  the  notion  that  there  are  two  kingdoms,  one 
earthly,  formal,  fictitious;  the  other  heavenly,  spiritual,  real.  It 
is  not  necessary  for  their  vindication,  seeing  that  neither  of  these 
facts  can  be  calmly  examined,  even  in  the  reports  of  those  who 
insist  most  upon  them,  without  suggesting  the  notion,  that  there 
must  be  a  heavenly,  spiritual,  real  kingdom,  against  which  all  evil 
men,  just  in  so  far  forth  as  they  are  evil,  are  rebelling;  and  into 
subjection  to  which  all  converted  men,  in  so  far  forth  as  they  are 
converted,  are  brought.  And  therefore,  whatever  evils  have  flowed 
and  are  flowing  from  this  notion,  are  not  justified  or  compensated 
for  by  one  practical  advantage.  How  practical  the  evils  are,  let 
the  history  of  Christian  Europe  since  the  Reformation  attest !  I 
have  spoken  of  the  difference  between  Luther  and  the  Lutherans, 
even  between  Calvin  and  the  Calvinists;  I  have  spoken  of  the 
way  in  which  Justification  by  faith  has  been  turned  from  a  living 
principle  into  an  empty  shibboleth,  in  which  the  divine  Election 
has  lost  its  force,  except  as  an  excuse  for  doubting  the  existence  of 
our  own  awful  responsibilities.  If  we  trace  these  miserable  fruits 
to  their  root,  we  shall  find  it  I  believe  in  this  notion.  This  at  least 
is  certain,  as  I  have  had  occasion  again  and  again  to  remark,  that 
the  doctrine  of  Baptismal  Regeneration  was  held  by  Luther  not  in 
conjunction  with  that  of  Justification  by  faith,  (as  he  might  have 
I  held  any  doctrine  which  belonged  to  the  natural  philosophy  of  his 
age,)  but  that  he  grounded  the  one  on  the  other.  "Believe  on  the 
warrant  of  your  Baptism,  You  are  grafted  into  Christ ;  claim  your 
position.  You  have  the  Spirit,  you  are  children  of  God ;  do  not 
live  as  if  you  belonged  to  the  devil."  This  was  his  invariable 
language,  with  this  he  shook  the  Seven  Hills. 

What,  I  ask,  have  those  done  who  have  abandoned  this  lan- 
guage, and  who,  while  they  talk  of  Luther,  would  actually  de- 
nounce any  one  as  heretical  and  papistical  who  used  it  ?  The 
children  of  Protestant  families  are  told  that  they  have  no  right  to 
call  themselves  children  of  God.  They  grow  up  in  that  convic- 
tion ;  in  maturer  years  they  carry  it  to  its  legitimate  consequences. 
They  feel  that  they  have  no  right  to  use  the  Lord's  prayer,  no 


256 


SIGNS  OF  A 


right  to  pray  at  all ;  that  they  have  no  power  near  them  to  keep 
them  from  temptation  ;  that  they  have  no  bonds  of  fellowship  with 
any,  except  on  the  grounds  of  liking  and  taste.  Gradually  as 
their  understandings  ripen  and  their  feelings  decay,  they  begin  to 
regard  Protestantism  as  a  half-way  house  between  Popery  and 
Infidelity ;  and  whether  they  shall  go  back  to  the  one,  or  on  to 
the  other,  depends  principally  upon  their  circumstances,  and  upon 
the  predominance  of  the  fancy  or  of  the  intellect  in  their  constitu- 
tion. I  speak  of  the  more  courageous ;  in  the  majority,  dull  indif- 
ference, which  is  incapable  of  either  resolve,  becomes  the  ruling 
habit  of  mind.  Thanks  be  to  God,  the  exceptions  to  my  statement, 
in  all  Protestant  countries,  are  innumerable.  But  I  believe  it  will 
be  found  almost  universally,  that  they  occur  when  parents  have 
acted  upon  the  principle  which  I  am  maintaining,  though  in  words 
they  have  disavowed  it ;  when  they  have  treated  their  children  as 
if  they  possessed  all  Christian  titles  and  privileges,  though  they 
did  so  in  utter  disregard  of  their  own  theory.  That,  even  in  such 
cases,  the  contradiction  has  not  been  innocuous,  I  think  I  can 
affirm  with  some  confidence.  A  sense  of  perplexity,  of  half  sin- 
cerity, cleaves  to  the  minds  of  those  who  most  long  to  keep  a  clear 
heart  and  a  free  conscience.  They  do  not  dare  to  call  themselves 
by  a  name  which  yet  they  feel  they  must  claim,  if  they  are  to 
serve  God  or  to  do  any  right  act.  Hence  their  conduct  becomes 
uncertain,  their  thoughts  are  not  manly ;  and,  in  place  of  humility, 
they  cultivate  a  false  shame,  in  which  they  are  conscious  that  pride 
is  a  large  ingredient.  There  are  hundreds  of  young  men  who  will 
understand  my  meaning ;  there  are  others,  I  mean  ministers  of  the 
Gospel,  to  whom  I  wish  that  I  could  make  it  intelligible.  But  at 
all  events,  those  who  feel  as  I  do  in  this  matter,  will  have  bitter 
cause  for  self-reproach,  if  they  do  not  protest  in  season  and  out  of 
season,  against  a  notion  which,  if  1  be  not  greatly  mistaken,  is 
doing  more  than  all  others  to  undermine  the  Christianity  of  the 
Protestant  nations. 

4.    The  Philosopher. 

IV.  Last  come  our  modern  Philosophers.  Their  notions  upon 
this  subject  are  generally  indicated  by  some  such  language  as  the 
following.    "  Baptism  cannot  be  the  sign  of  a  Universal  Society, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


257 


for  it  excludes  Pagans  and  Mahometans — all  but  the  members  of 
a  certain  religious  sect ;  Baptism  cannot,  in  any  proper  sense,  be 
the  sign  of  a  Spiritual  Society,  for  it  makes  no  distinction  between 
the  most  stupid  and  the  most  cultivated,  the  most  brutal  and  the 
most  humane ;  Baptism,  by  the  very  terms  in  which  it  is  performed, 
implies  the  acknowledgment  of  a  doctrine  which  many  Christians 
deny,  few  think  of,  and  none  understand  ;  Baptism,  if  wTe  may 
judge  from  the  words  or  the  ceremonies  which  everywhere  accom- 
pany it,  presumes  the  belief  of  an  evil  spiritual  agency,  a  belief 
belonging  only  to  the  darkest  ages.  Baptism  was  unquestionably 
a  bond  of  fellowship  in  certain  periods  ;  it  did  mean  something  to 
those  who  lived  in  them ;  but  its  significance  is  gone ;  it  is  changed 
into  a  worthless  symbol  which  may  be  allowed  to  last  so  long  as 
it  does  not  pretend  to  be  any  thing,  but  which  the  moment  it  en- 
deavours to  recover  its  obsolete  importance  will  be  rejected  by  wise 
men  altogether." 

To  the  first  of  these  objections,  that  Baptism  is  exclusive,  be- 
cause merely  for  those  wrho  profess  a  faith  in  Christ,  I  reply.  As 
against  the  theologians  who  look  upon  Christ  merely  as  the  great 
teacher,  this  argument  has  the  greatest  force  :  to  baptize  men  into 
the  name  of  Christ  is,  if  they  be  right,  to  receive  them  into  the 
sect  or  school  of  a  certain  person  who  appeared  in  Palestine  1800 
years  ago.  We  may  prefer  him  to  one  who  appeared  in  Arabia 
about  1200  years  ago,  but  our  taste,  which  increased  information 
may  change  altogether,  is  surely  no  true  foundation  for  a  human 
fellowship.  But,  be  it  remembered,  this  is  not  the  idea  of  Baptism 
as  it  is  expressed  in  any  one  formulary  which  is  recognised  in  any 
part  of  Christendom.  That  idea  assumes  Christ  to  be  the  Lord  of 
men  ;  it  assumes  that  men  are  created  in  Him ;  that  this  is  the 
constitution  of  our  race ;  that  therefore  all  attempts  of  men  to 
reduce  themselves  into  separate  units  are  contradictory  and  abor- 
tive. Now  say,  if  you  please,  that  this  is  an  utterly  false  view  of 
things ;  say  that  it  does  not  in  the  least  explain  the  relations  of 
men  to  each  other  and  the  meaning  of  their  history ;  say  that  there 
is  no  spiritual  constitution  for  mankind,  or  that  it  cannot  be  known, 
or  that  it  is  not  this.  But  you  cannot  say  that  if  it  were  this,  a 
society  founded  upon  such  a  principle  would  be  merely  one  for  a 
party  and  not  for  mankind.    According  to  our  doctrine  we  must 

17 


258 


SIGNS  OF  A 


say  to  Jews,  Pagans,  Turks,  There  is  a  fellowship  for  you  as  well 
as  for  us.  We  have  no  right  to  any  spiritual  privileges  to  which 
you  have  not  as  complete,  as  indefeasible  a  right.  We  protest 
against  you,  Jews,  because  you  deny  this,  because  you  maintain 
that  there  is  no  fellowship  for  mankind.  We  protest  against  you, 
Pagans,  because  by  giving  us  different  objects  of  worship,  you 
necessarily  divide  us  according  to  circumstances,  customs,  localities. 
We  protest  against  you,  Mahometans,  because,  by  affirming  the 
greatest  man  to  be  merely  a  man,  you  destroy  the  communication 
between  our  race  and  its  Maker;  you  suppose  that  communication 
to  exist,  if  at  all,  merely  for  certain  sages,  not  for  every  human 
creature.  You  set  up  the  idea  of  absoluteness  against  the  idea  of 
relationship ;  whereas  each  is  involved  in  the  other  and  depends 
upon  the  other ;  and  therefore  you  make  it  impossible  for  the  Is- 
lamite nations  to  have  any  feeling  of  a  humanity,  to  be  any  thing 
but  slaves. 

Again,  it  is  said,  that  our  baptismal  fellowship  is  not  spiritual, 
for  that  it  takes  no  account  of  the  spiritual  differences  in  men. 
The  dullest  clod  has  the  same  place  in  it,  as  the  man  who  sees  fur- 
thest into  the  meaning  and  life  of  things.  Here,  again,  it  is  neces- 
sary, that  we  should  recall  the  objector  to  the  baptismal  principle. 
He  may  think  that  we  are  using  a  mere  phrase,  or  form  of  words, 
when  we  say  that  the  man  or  the  child  is  actually  adopted  into 
union  with  a  Being  above  himself,  and  that  the  Spirit  of  Life,  of 
Power,  of  Wisdom,  is  given  to  him.  All  this  may  seem  to  him 
the  merest  absurdity.  But  we  do  not  think  it  so.  And,  supposing 
it  were  not  an  absurdity,  supposing  it  were  a  truth,  there  would  be 
no  pretence  for  the  accusation  we  are  considering.  Then  we  should 
not  only  be  bearing  witness  that  the  greatest  distinction  of  all  is 
that  between  the  man  who  has  an  eye  for  spiritual  objects,  and 
the  man  who  sees  nothing  but  the  ground  at  his  feet ;  we  should 
not  only  be  bearing  this  witness,  but  we  should  actually  be  taking 
men  into  a  position  in  which  they  might,  if  they  w?ould,  overcome 
their  downward  tendencies  and  attain  the  highest  insight.  Un- 
questionably we  do  not  look  out  for  intellectual  or  moral  aptitudes, 
and  expose  the  children  in  whom  we  do  not  discover  them  ;  we 
believe  that  there  is  an  eye  in  all  men  which  can  be  opened  if  the 
evil  Will  do  not  keep  it  closed  j  that  all  peculiar  faculties  and 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


259 


capacities  are  subordinate  to  this,  and  will  be  best  awakened  when 
it  is  most  in  exercise.  But  this  doctrine  is  surely  not  one  to  which 
philosophers  of  this  day  can  on  principle  object,  however  little  they 
may  be  inclined  habitually  to  act  upon  it. 

The  third  complaint  is,  that  this  universal  sign  is  inseparably 
associated  with  the  belief  of  an  incomprehensible  dogma.  Now 
when  we  were  examining  the  features  of  the  Unitarian  creed,  we 
were  led  to  notice,  as  the  most  prominent  and  striking  of  them, 
the  assertion  that  the  unity  of  God  is  a  great  primary  unchange- 
able truth,  upon  which  all  others  must  rest,  and  the  acknowledg- 
ment of  which  must  be  the  foundation  of  unity  among  men.  This 
affirmation  seemed  to  us  of  the  highest  importance ;  we  said  that 
no  theories  or  conclusions  or  dogmas,  let  them  be  backed  by  what 
authority,  or  supported  by  what  arguments  they  might,  could 
destroy  its  force,  or  make  it  nugatory.  But  we  found  that  this 
truth  of  the  Divine  Unity,  this  awful,  everlasting  primary  truth, 
had  been  turned  by  the  (so  called)  Unitarians  into  a  mere  notion 
or  dogma,  a  notion  or  dogma  actually  deduced  from  material  con- 
siderations and  therefore  self-contradictory ;  a  notion  purely  negative, 
which  said  to  Poly t heists,  "  You  ought  not  to  worship  many  gods" 
without  declaring  to  them  the  one  God  whom  they  ought  to  wor- 
ship ;  a  notion  not  leading  to  the  adoration  of  a  Living  Being,  but 
to  a  superstitious  reverence  for  the  number  one,  a  notion  therefore 
which  never  could  be  the  symbol  of  a  human  fellowship.  If  then  it 
be  true  that  this  unity  is  at  the  root  of  all  union  among  men,  if  it 
be  the  deep  foundation  upon  which  the  pillars  of  the  universe  rest, 
one  must  look  not  for  a  rude  national  announcement  of  it,  but  for 
a  gradual  discovery  of  it,  through  the  forms  and  relations  of  human 
society.  Such  a  discovery  I  have  urged  is  to  be  found  in  the 
Scriptures  ;  a  discovery  of  which  the  name  revealed  to  the  father 
of  the  faithful  was  the  first  step  ;  the  words,  "  Hear,  0  Israel,  the 
Lord  thy  God  is  one  Lord,"  a  second  ;  the  name  into  which  we 
are  baptized,  the  final  and  perfect  step.  I  do  not  say  that  this  is 
a  progress  from  the  obscure  to  the  intelligible,  from  the  remote  to 
the  near  ;  far  from  it :  like  all  science  it  is  an  advance  from  that 
which  may  be  apprehended  by  the  Senses  or  the  Affections,  to  that 
which  is  deeper  and  is  only  within  the  reach  of  the  Understanding 
or  the  Conscience ;  then  onwards  to  those  amazing  abysses  which 


260 


SIGNS  OF  A 


the  Reason  seeks  after,  in  which  she  delights,  wonders,  and  is  lost. 
If  it  were  not  this,  it  would  not  be  a  revelation  of  God  ;  but  being 
this,  it  is,  as  we  believe,  not  the  cold  denial  and  contradiction  of 
all  that  men  have  been  dreaming  of  through  the  different  ages  of 
the  world,  but  rather  the  sweet  reconciliation  and  exquisite  harmony 
of  all  past  thoughts,  anticipations,  revelations.  No  Pagan  mythol- 
ogy could  exist  without  the  acknowledgment  of  a  Something 
beneath  and  behind  all  their  conceptions  of  the  gods,  too  awful  to 
speak  of,  almost  to  think  of.  Each  mythology  contained  also  its 
Heroes  of  divine  and  human  race,  whom  men  might  admire,  and 
with  whom  they  might  sympathize.  And  this  was  not  enough 
without  the  dream  of  an  Inspirer,  Life-giver  ;  not  removed  from 
men,  not  even  a  mere  object  to  be  beheld  and  adored,  but  the 
source  of  all  their  deeper  thoughts  and  longings.  How  dark  and 
sensualized  this  faith  became — how  the  absolute  Being  was  regard- 
ed as  a  dreary  fate,  the  Heroes  as  the  fruit  of  earthly  passions  and 
full  of  earthly  crimes,  the  Inspirer  as  the  god  of  folly  and  drunken- 
ness— I  need  not  tell ;  nor  how  jarring  these  forms  of  belief  were 
in  their  best  estate,  how  continually  seeking  for  a  unity  and  not 
finding  it.  Still,  the  feelings  were  really  there  ;  expressed  indeed, 
by  poets  and  sages,  but  only  because  it  was  their  gift  to  utter  that 
which  was  in  the  hearts  of  poor  men,  that  which  they  were  ob- 
scurely feeling  or  dimly  acting  out.  Now,  if  the  Name,  into  which 
we  Europeans  have  for  so  many  centuries  been  baptized,  be,  as  wTe 
believe  it  is,  that  which  brings  all  these  thoughts  at  one,  sepa- 
rating them  from  their  hateful  and  degrading  additions,  raising 
them  to  Heaven,  and  yet  establishing  a  more  direct  and  intimate 
connection  between  them,  and  all  the  daily  transactions  of  this 
earth — are  we  guilty  of  fencing  men  off  from  our  Communion  by 
a  strange  dogma  of  which  they  can  know  nothing,  when  we  tell 
them  that  this  Name  is  to  go  with  them  from  their  cradle  to  their 
grave;  that  the  grace,  the  love,  the  fellowship  of  this  name  are  to 
be  with  them  as  charms  against  all  perils,  light  in  all  darkness, 
comfort  in  all  sorrow  ;  that  it  is  to  bind  them  with  that  which  was 
in  the  beginning,  is  now,  and  ever  shall  be ;  that  every  homely 
duty,  every  act  of  self-sacrifice,  every  deed  of  mercy,  will  make 
the  vision  of  it  more  bright,  as  that  vision  will  be  clouded  by  every 
act  of  sin,  every  proud  thought,  every  uncharitable  feeling ;  that 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


261 


the  more  they  cleave  to  this  name,  the  less  they  will  dream  of 
selfish  rewards,  the  more  they  will  long  for  the  day  when  the  sun- 
light of  God's  countenance  may  gladden  the  whole  creation  ;  that 
the  communion  of  the  Father  and  the  Son  in  one  Spirit,  as  it  has 
been  the  ground  of  all  their  thoughts  and  hopes,  so  will  be  the 
consummation  of  them  all,  to  those  who  shall  wake  up  in  the  same 
likeness,  and  be  satisfied  with  it  ? 

But  Baptism  implies  the  acknowledgment  of  an  evil  spiritual 
agent,  and  this  belief  is  at  war  with  all  civilization  and  philosophy. 
1  am  as  little  disposed  to  shrink  from  this  charge  as  from  any  of 
the  others.  Baptism  unquestionably  has  been  connected  with  this 
doctrine  ever  since  it  was  practised  ;  it  must,  I  think,  be  an  un- 
meaning ceremony  to  any  one  by  whom  this  doctrine  is  denied. 

This  opinion  I  ground  upon  the  remarks  which  have  just  been 
made  respecting  the  Baptismal  Name.  Baptism  asserts  for  each 
man  that  he  is  taken  into  union  with  a  divine  Person,  and  by  virtue 
of  that  union  is  emancipated  from  his  evil  Nature.  But  this 
assertion  rests  upon  another,  that  there  is  a  society  for  mankind 
which  is  constituted  and  held  together  in  that  person,  and  that  he 
who  enters  this  society  is  emancipated  from  the  World — the  society 
which  is  bound  together  in  the  acknowledgment  of,  and  subjection 
to,  the  evil  selfish  tendencies  of  each  man's  nature.  But,  further, 
it  affirms  that  this  unity  among  men,  rests  upon  a  yet  more  awful 
and  perfect  unity,  upon  that  which  is  expressed  in  the  Name  of 
the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  Holy  Ghost.  Lose  sight  of  this  last 
and  deepest  principle,  and  both  the  others  perish  ;  for  to  believe 
that  there  is  a  Truth,  a  Unity,  a  Love,  existing  under  certain  forms, 
and  not  to  believe  that  there  is  an  absolute  Truth,  Unity,  Love, 
from  which  these  forms  have  derived  their  excellence  and  their 
existence,  is  impossible,  and  has  been  always  felt  to  be  impossible. 
But  is  it  not  equally  impossible  to  the  Reason,  has  not  the  Experi- 
ence of  mankind  proved  it  to  be  impossible,  to  contemplate  the 
antagonist  forms  of  evil,  without  ascending  to  the  belief  of  an  evil 
which  has  impregnated  those  forms,  and  wThich  can  exist  apart 
from  them  ?  So  necessary  has  this  conviction  been  found,  not  to 
a  few  but  to  all,  that  the  imagination  has  been  continually  framing 
to  itself  the  horrid  notion  of  an  evil,  which  is  not  merely  the  source 
and  spring  of  all  that  is  evil  in  the  actual  condition  of  things,  but 


262 


SIGNS  OF  A 


which  is  the  source  of  those  things  themselves,  a  primary  original 
power,  a  rival  Creator.  This  Manicheeism,  though  only  at  par- 
ticular seasons  it  may  have  been  congealed  into  a  system,  has  been 
haubting  men's  minds  from  the  beginning  of  the  world,  and  is 
haunting  us  all  still.  But  whence  comes  it,  and  what  is  the  great 
prop  of  it  ?  Surely  it  is  this.  We  cannot  deny  the  facts  of  misery 
and  evil  which  thrust  themselves  upon  our  notice.  We  feel  that 
we  must  refer  them  to  a  cause.  But  not  daring  to  look  steadily  at 
the  idea  of  an  evil  will,  and  to  contemplate  it  in  the  light  of  a 
perfectly  pure  and  holy  will,  we  fancy  that  the  powers  which  are 
exerted  for  an  evil  end  are  evil,  that  the  things  which  are  turned 
to  an  accursed  use  are  themselves  accursed.  Hence  the  Oromasdes 
and  Arimanes  doctrine  ;  hence,  too,  all  the  superstitious  notions 
which  have  peopled  nature  with  malignant  influences  and  objects 
of  dread.  How  are  such  dark  dreams  to  be  dispelled  ?  Not  by 
setting  aside  facts ;  not  by  outraging  the  innermost  convictions  of 
mankind  ;  not  by  separating  men  from  one  another,  as  you  do  most 
effectually,  when  you  teach  them  that  the  evil  which  each  is  to 
contend  with  in  himself,  and  the  evil  which  he  sees  in  his  fellow- 
creatures,  or  w7hich  he  notices  in  the  history  of  the  world,  have  no 
common  derivation.  These  outrages  upon  reason  and  conscience 
have  been  perpetrated  again  and  again  by  so-called  philosophers, 
but  what  have  they  effected  ?  What  one  dark  fear  have  they 
removed  out  of  our  path  ?  What  new  bond  of  affection  have  they 
created  between  the  members  of  the  human  family  ?  The  mockery 
has  gone  forth  ;  it  has  been  listened  to,  admired,  adopted  ;  and  in 
the  next  age  all  the  old  superstitions  have  returned  ;  the  imagination 
has  revenged  itself  for  the  denial  of  an  evil  Spirit,  by  turning  all 
the  forms  of  Society  and  of  Nature  into  evil.  Meantime,  this 
Baptism  has  been  testifying  to  high  and  low,  to  meh  of  all  coun- 
tries, languages,  customs,  that  they  have  a  common  friend  and  a 
common  enemy  ;  but  that  the  enemy  has  been  vanquished,  has 
been  declared  to  have  no  right  or  property  in  any  human 
creature,  in  any  one  corner  of  the  universe  ;  that  his  power  is  con- 
ferred by  our  faithlessness ;  that  while  we  are  claiming  our  true 
position  we  may  despise  and  defy  him  ;  that  it  is  only  by  making 
a  lie  that  we  come  under  the  dominion  of  the  father  of  lies.  And 
yet  it  testifies  as  strongly  to  the  fact,  the  monstrous  fact,  that  men 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


263 


may  be  making  lies,  may  be  living  in  a  position  the  most  utterly 
anomalous  and  unreasonable  ;  that  nothing  but  entire  dependence 
upon  the  righteous  and  holy  Being  rescues  any  one  from  this  posi- 
tion ;  that  every  one  therefore  has  a  devil  to  fight  with,  as  well  as 
a  world  and  a  flesh.  Get  rid  of  this  contradiction,  if  you  can,  by 
the  philosophy  of  denials.  We  shall  continue,  with  God's  assist- 
ance, to  seek  deliverance  from  it  by  declaring  to  men  their  true 
state,  and  by  adopting  them  into  it. 

To  what  extent  the  general  charge  is  made  out  that  Baptism  is 
a  bygone  symbol,  may  be  inferred  from  the  particular  arguments 
upon  which  it  is  grounded.  If  there  be  nothing  which  does  not  be- 
long to  a  particular  age,  nothing  permanent,  nothing  real ;  if  there 
be  nothing  to  connect  together  the  portions  of  mankind  which  are 
separated  by  space  and  time,  then  the  sign  is  obsolete  because  there 
is  nothing  to  be  signified  by  it.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  all  men  in 
all  times  have  sought,  and  the  men  of  this  age  above  all  others  are 
professing  to  seek,  for  some  common  human  bonds  which  were  not 
created  to  suit  a  particular  period  and  locality,  and  which  do  not 
change  when  the  notions  and  theories  of  that  period  have  proved 
futile,  when  the  customs  of  that  locality  are  not  applicable,  I  ask, 
where  is  the  proof  that  this  sign  is  not  as  fresh  now  as  it  was  1800 
years  ago?  That  men  in  times  of  sensuality,  of  luxury,  of  religious 
exclusiveness,  of  philosophical  pretension,  become  impatient  of  it, 
I  willingly  admit.  What  better  argument  do  I  want  than  this,  that 
it  is  a  true  thing,  a  witness  for  that  which  is  spiritual,  real,  simple, 
universal  ?  Thanks  be  to  God,  that  He  has  not  left  eternal  truths, 
which  concern  all  men,  to  the  custody  of  the  wise  and  prudent  of 
the  earth;  that  He  has  embodied  them  in  forms  which  from  gene- 
ration to  generation  have  been  witnesses  of  his  love  to  the  humble 
and  the  meek,  and  which  all  the  contradictions  of  pride  and  self- 
will  only  help  to  illustrate  and  interpret. 

THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 

I  have  stated  why  I  look  upon  Baptism  as  the  first  sign  of  the 
existence  of  a  Catholic  Church  or  Kingdom  of  Christ  in  the  world. 
I  have  considered  the  different  objections  to  that  view  of  it.  But 
in  the  course  of  these  remarks  I  have  alluded  to  a  class  of  persons 
who  are  most  earnest  in  proclaiming  the  fact  that  there  is  such  a 


264 


SIGNS  OF  A 


Church,  and  equally  earnest  in  maintaining  that  Baptism  is  the  only 
induction  into  it.  I  have  intimated  that,  nevertheless,  I  differ  most 
widely  with  these  persons,  and  believe  that  the  dignity  of  Baptism 
was  asserted  against  them  by  the  Reformers  of  the  16th  century. 
I  am  then,  I  conceive,  bound  to  consider  the  doctrine  respecting 
Baptism  which  is  professed  by  the  Romanists,  and  to  give  my  rea- 
sons for  not  adopting  it. 

The  common  phrase  that  the  Romanist  regards  Baptism  as  an 
opus  operatum,  is  one  which  may  be  liable  to  much  perversion. 
An  intelligent  defender  of  the  system  would  protest  earnestly 
against  some  opinions  which  might  seem,  at  first  hearing,  to  be  im- 
plied in  it.  "  To  suppose,"  he  would  say,  "  from  our  use  of  it,  that 
we  look  upon  a  baptized  person  as  incapable  of  falling  into  sin  or 
losing  heaven,  would  be  to  contradict  monstrously  and  ridiculously 
every  notion  which  our  doctors  have  inculcated  in  their  writings  or 
our  priests  enforced  in  their  practice.  The  disciples  of  the  Reform- 
ation complain  of  us  for  our  vigilance  and  self-suspicion.  It  is  our 
strongest  conviction  that  a  dereliction  of  baptismal  privileges  is  at 
once  most  possible  and  most  awful."  But  having  guarded  himself 
by  this  explanation  he  would,  I  think,  be  most  ready  to  admit  the 
phrase  as  legitimate,  and  to  unfold,  in  some  such  words  as  these, 
the  sense  of  it.  "  By  baptism,"  he  wTould  say,  "  we  receive  the 
benefits  of  the  redemption  which  Christ  wrought  out  for  us.  We 
become  new  and  holy  creatures.  The  work  is  finished ;  wTe  have 
received  the  highest  blessing  which  God  can  bestow  upon  us. 
Henceforth  our  business  is,  by  the  use  of  all  the  means  which  the 
Church  prescribes,  to  keep  ourselves  in  this  state  of  purity.  We 
shall  not  preserve  it  altogether :  we  shall  be  committing  frequent 
venial  sins,  which,  after  confession  and  penance,  will,  we  have  a 
right  to  hope,  be  forgiven  us.  But  wTe  may,  by  constantly  availing 
ourselves  of  the  prayers  and  communion  of  the  Church,  preserve 
ourselves  from  those  mortal  sins  which  wrould  utterly  rob  us  of  the 
divine  blessing.  Should  a  sin  of  this  kind  have  been  committed,  or 
should  there  be  any  fear  that  it  has  been  committed,  wre  may  still 
have  just  such  a  hope  of  restoration  as  is  an  encouragement  to  the 
most  unabated  earnestness  and  diligence  in  seeking  for  it  by  the 
appointed  methods." 

Now  it  will  strike  the  reader  at  once,  that  in  certain  points  this 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


265 


explanation  corresponds  exactly  with  the  one  which  I  have  given. 
First,  as  to  the  effect  of  Baptism.  I  have  contended  that  Baptism 
affirms  a  man  to  be  in  a  certain  state,  and  affirms  the  presence  of  a 
Spirit  with  him,  who  is  able  and  willing  to  uphold  him  in  that 
state,  and  to  bring  his  life  into  accordance  with  it.  Secondly,  as  to 
the  sin  of  men.  I  have  contended  that  this  consists  in  their  volun- 
tarily refusing  the  blessings  of  God's  covenant.  Thirdly,  as  to  the 
means  by  which  we  are  most  likely  to  be  kept  in  the  right  way ; 
I  should  say,  as  the  Romanist  does,  by  abiding  in  those  ordinances, 
whereby  we  maintain  a  communion  with  our  brethren  and  with 
God.  Where  then  does  the  difference  between  us  begin  ?  I  an- 
swer, at  the  threshold  of  these  very  statements.  A  man  is  brought 
into  a  certain  state.  The  point  is,  what  state  ?  I  have  said,  and 
I  know  the  Romanist  would  not  in  words  contradict  me,  into  a 
state  of  union  with  Christ.  But  this  state,  I  have  contended,  pre- 
cludes the  notion  that  goodness,  purity,  holiness,  belongs  to  any 
creature  considered  in  itself.  To  be  something  in  himself  is  man's 
ambition,  man's  sin.  Baptism  is  emphatically  the  renunciation  of 
that  pretence.  A  man  does  not,  therefore,  by  Baptism,  by  faith,  or 
by  any  other  process,  acquire  a  new  nature,  if  by  nature  you  mean, 
as  most  men  do,  certain  inherent  qualities  and  properties.  He  does 
not  by  Baptism,  faith,  or  any  other  process,  become  a  new  creature, 
if  by  these  words  you  mean  any  thing  else  than  that  he  is  created 
anew  in  Christ  Jesus,  that  he  is  grafted  into  him,  that  he  becomes 
the  inheritor  of  his  life  and  not  of  his  own.  That,  being  so  grafted, 
he  receives  the  Spirit  of  Christ,  I  of  course  believe.  But  I  contend, 
that  the  operation  of  this  Spirit  upon  him  is  to  draw  him  continual- 
ly out  of  himself,  to  teach  him  to  disclaim  all  independent  virtue, 
to  bring  him  into  the  knowledge  and  image  of  the  Father  and  the 
Son.  Upon  these  grounds,  I  have  maintained,  against  our  modern 
Protestants,  that  the  sin  of  a  baptized  man  consists  in  acting  as  if 
he  were  not  in  union  with  Christ,  in  setting  up  his  own  nature  and 
his  own  will,  and  in  obeying  them.  That  is  to  say,  his  sin  consists 
in  doing  acts  which  are  self-contradictory,  in  assuming  to  be  that 
which  he  is  not  and  never  can  be,  in  denying  that  he  is  that  which 
he  is  and  ever  must  be.  What  follows  ?  Surely  that  faith  in  this 
union  is  a  duty,  the  greatest  of  all  duties^  and  that  it  can  never 
cease  to  be  a  duty.    A  man  has  no  right  to  believe  a  lie.    Sin  leads 


266 


SIGNS  OF  A 


him  to  do  it;  sin  brings  him  into  a  condition  of  mind  in  which  a  lie 
seems  truth  to  him.  It  may  bring  him  into  a  condition  of  mind  in 
which  lying  becomes  the  element  of  his  being,  in  which  truth  is 
absolutely  closed  from  his  eyes.  The  possibility  of  this  sort  of  mor- 
tal sin  I  cannot  doubt,  either  while  I  meditate  upon  the  awful  ten- 
dencies to  atheism,  which  there  are  in  every  one  of  us,  or  while  I 
read  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  But  supposing  this  awful  condi- 
tion had  actually  taken  place  in  any  man,  it  could  not  change  the 
fact  in  the  least  degree ;  it  would  establish  the  fact.  Is  the  writer 
of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  less  earnest  in  his  exhortations  to  faith 
than  the  other  writers  of  the  New  Testament  ?  Does  he  less  invite 
men  to  enter  into  God's  rest  ?  Does  he  separate  these  exhortations 
and  invitations  from  his  warnings  respecting  the  peril  of  apostasy? 
or  does  he  not  make  that  peril  one  of  his  main  arguments  why 
every  one  of  those  whom  he  addressed  should  claim  his  privileges  as 
a  citizen  of  the  New  Jerusalem  ? 

For  precisely  the  same  reason,  I  attempted  to  show  that  the 
Evangelical  or  modern  Protestant  notion  made  repentance  impos- 
sible. If  we  are  not  allowed  to  call  ourselves  children  of  God, 
how  can  we  be  told  to  arise  and  go  to  our  Father  ?  If  we  are  not 
to  do  this,  what  does  our  repentance  mean  ?  It  can  be  nothing 
but  a  sinful  selfish  struggle  after  the  blessings  of  corn,  and  wine, 
and  the  fatness  of  the  earth,  which  we  think  we  have  lost ;  not  an 
humble  confession  that  we  have  made  light  of  our  birthright,  and 
are  no  more  worthy  to  be  called  sons.  The  repentance  of  the  world 
may  be  produced  by  the  desire  or  effort  to  obtain  an  assurance  that 
we  are  members  of  God's  redeemed  family ;  the  repentance  which 
leadeth  to  life  must  be  the  confession  of  the  unbelief,  ingratitude, 
hardness  of  heart,  which  have  led  us  to  slight  a  love  which  has 
been  bestowed  freely,  and  which  has  never  ceased  to  watch  over 
us  and  to  struggle  with  us. 

Now  the  doctrine  of  the  opus  operation  leads,  I  think,  by  a  more 
circuitous,  but  also  by  a  more  certain,  route  to  those  practical  re- 
sults which  seem  to  me  to  make  our  Protestant  systems  so  danger- 
ous and  objectionable. 

When  it  is  said  that  a  baptized  man  loses  his  baptismal  state,  it 
is  inevitably  implied  tflat  this  state  was  one  of  independent  holiness 
and  purity.    We  do  not,  as  I  have  again  and  again  urged,  cease  to 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


267 


be  children  because  we  are  disobedient  children.  If,  therefore, 
Baptism  were  looked  upon  as  the  adoption  into  the  state  of  chil- 
dren, and  if  its  virtue  were  believed  to  consist  in  this,  the  notion 
we  are  considering  would  be  impossible.  But,  it  is  supposed  that 
the  man  acquires  something  for  himself  in  the  instant  of  Baptism, 
that  he  is  endowed  with  heavenly  virtues,  that  he  is  in  himself, 
separately  considered,  a  new  creature.  By  this  opinion  the  Roman- 
ist supposes -that  he  exalts  Baptism.  He  seems  to  me  utterly  to 
degrade  it  and  rob  it  of  its  meaning.  He  turns  a  sacrament  into 
an  event.  He  supposes  the  redemption  of  Christ  to  be  exhausted 
by  a  certain  gift,  while  the  Bible  represents  it  as  bringing  men 
into  an  eternal  and  indissoluble  fellowship.  He  thinks  that  he 
promotes  a  safer,  holier,  more  watchful  feeling.  It  seems  to  me, 
that  just  so  far  as  this  opinion  becomes  the  governing  one  of  our 
lives,  it  undermines  holiness,  watchfulness,  safety.  For  it  turns  the 
whole  of  life  into  a  struggle  for  the  recovery  of  a  lost  good.  If 
this  struggle  is  pursued  honestly,  there  is  no  holiness  in  it,  for  it  is 
purely  selfish,  it  does  not,  cannot,  be  prompted  by  love.  But  in 
most  men  there  arises  a  cruel  sense  of  contradiction.  They  are 
commanded  to  repent ;  they  feel  that  they  cannot  repent,  for  their 
consciences  tell  them  that  lamentation  for  the  consequences  of  sin, 
present  or  expected,  is  not  repentance ;  hence  a  craving  for  indul- 
gences, a  habit  of  unbelief,  a  despair  of  holiness.  AVhich  of  these 
conditions  of  feeling  is  a  safe  one  for  a  human  creature  to  be 
in  ?  But  the  Romanist  thinks  that  at  all  events  he  is  honouring 
the  Church  by  this  notion.  To  me  it  seems  that  he  is  destroying 
the  very  idea  of  the  Church — denying  its  necessity.  For  he  makes 
it  appear  that  the  blessing  of  Baptism  is  not  this,  that  it  receives 
men  into  the  holy  Communion  of  Saints,  but  that  it  bestows 
upon  them  certain  individual  blessings,  endows  them  with  a  certain 
individual  holiness.  How  then  is  self-renunciation  and  fellowship 
as  members  of  the  same  body  possible  ?  And  if  these  are  impos- 
sible, what  is  the  Church  ?  * 

It  will  be  admitted,  I  hope,  that  I  have  not  imputed  to  Roman- 
ists any  thing  which  is  merely  an  excess  or  exaggeration  of  their 
creed  upon  this  great  subject.  There  is  a  system  of  which  this  doc- 
trine forms  an  integral  part.  But  do  I  therefore  mean  to  affirm  either 
that  this  doctrine  is  only  to  be  found  in  Romanist  writers,  or  that 


268 


SIGNS  OF  A 


the  one  I  have  defended  is  not  to  be  found  in  them  ?  I  believe 
that  if  I  brought  forward  any  such  propositions  I  should  be  easily 
confuted.  On  the  one  hand  it  might  be  proved,  by  extracts  from 
the  Fathers,  that  the  doctrine  of  an  opus  operatum  did  mingle  itself 
in  their  minds  with  that  of  our  being  grafted  into  Christ ;  on  the 
other  by  extracts  from  Anselm,  from  Hugo  de  St.  Victore,  from 
Bernard,  from  Aquinas,  nay  from  eminent  Romanists  of  the  present 
day,  that  the  very  idea  which  I  have  endeavoured  to  Express  has 
been  unfolded  by  them,  only  with  infinitely  more  eloquence  and 
unction.  All  this  I  believe  most  fully.  So  far  from  washing  to  hin- 
der the  theological  student  from  making  such  observations,  I  would 
do  my  best  to  force  them  upon  his  attention.  I  wrould  labour  to 
convince  him,  that  whenever  any  great  spiritual  principle  has  been 
strongly  revealed  to  men,  a  material  counterfeit  of  that  principle 
has  always  appeared  also;  that  they  have  dwelt  together  in  the 
minds  of  the  best  and  wisest  men  ;  that  if  we  seek  for  the  one  we 
must  turn  to  their  devotional  exercises,  to  the  occasions  when  they 
were  most  cultivating  fellowship  with  God  and  most  forgetting 
themselves ;  to  those  parts  of  their  writings  therefore  which  their 
disciples  often  study  the  least ;  that  if  we  seek  for  the  others  we 
shall  find  them  in  elaborate  controversial  treatises,  those  which 
supply  the  best  materials  for  theorems,  the  most  ready  formulas, 
the  most  convenient  weapons  of  argument  and  ridicule  against  op- 
ponents :  that  the  first  remain  for  the  delight  and  consolation  of 
humble  Christian  people  in  all  ages;  that  the  last  gradually  shape 
themselves  more  and  more  into  a  definite  system  ;  that  they  are 
supposed  to  be  bone  of  each  other's  bone,  and  flesh  of  each  other's 
flesh,  till  some  great  crisis  arrives,  in  which  it  pleases  God  to  de- 
monstrate the  difference  of  the  causes  by  the  difference  of  the  ef- 
fects, to  show  that  one  had  proceeded  from  Him  and  the  other  from 
the  devil.  Let  the  reader  then  not  be  dismayed  if  he  find  the  very 
highest  authorities  alleged  in  support  of  the  doctrine  of  an  opus 
operatum  ;  let  him  not  be  surprised  to  find  it  in  any  age  or  in  any 
part  of  the  Church,  (especially  in  any  which  had  greatly  under- 
valued sacraments,)  reappearing  and  asserting  its  claim  to  be  iden- 
tical with  the  Scriptural  and  Catholic  idea  of  it.  Let  him  not  be 
terrified  by  being  told,  when  he  attempts  to  discriminate  between 
them  that  he  is  setting  up  his  own  judgment  against  the  opinion  of 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


269 


doctors  and  the  testimony  of  antiquity.  Let  him  say  boldly,  I  am 
doing  no  such  thing.  I  am  simply  determining  that  I  will  not  be- 
lieve the  doctors  against  themselves;  that  I  will  not  suffer  myself 
to  be  cheated  of  a  transcendent  truth  which  they  have  taught  me,  a 
truth  which  was  evidently  dear  to  their  inmost  hearts,  a  truth  which 
they  felt  was  derived  from  the  teaching  of  Christ  himself,  and  bound 
them  to  the  Apostles  and  Martyrs  of  all  times,  a  truth  which  they 
acknowledged  was  contrary  to  all  their  carnal  apprehensions,  and 
was  only  preserved  to  them  by  the  continual  teachings  of  God's 
Spirit;  because  they  have  elsewhere,  while  arguing  with  adver- 
saries, while  attempting  to  make  a  principle  tell  upon  the  hopes  or 
fears  of  men  who  were  incapable  of  entering  into  its  true  meaning, 
while  drawing  conclusions  from  Scripture  by  their  private  judg- 
ments, while  apologizing  for  some  fungus  which  the  maxims  of 
their  age  had  confounded  with  the  tree  upon  which  it  grew,  pro- 
duced a  plausible  explanation  of  this  truth,  an  explanation  forgot- 
ten in  every  moment  of  higher  inspiration,  and  proving  itself  the 
less  divine  the  more  it  is  tried  by  its  fruits.  It  is  easy  to  accuse 
those  of  wanting  humility  who  have  courage  to  act  upon  this  deter- 
mination. I  believe  that  the  proud  system-seeking,  system-loving 
intellect  within  us,  disposes  us  to  embrace  the  doctrine  of  the  opus 
operatum  ;  that  the  humble  and  contrite  heart  craves  for  a  deeper 
principle,  and,  finding  it,  is  obliged  to  part  with  the  other  for  the 
sake  of  it. 


SECTION  II. 

THE  CREEDS. 

In  the  last  section  I  defended  my  view  of  Baptism  as  the  sign 
of  admission  into  a  Spiritual  and  Universal  Kingdom,  grounded 
upon  our  Lord's  incarnation,  and  ultimately  resting  upon  the  name 
of  the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  Holy  Spirit,  against  the  different 
Quaker,  Protestant,  Philosophical,  and  Romanist  theories,  which 
are  current  respecting  it.  But  I  have  very  much  failed  of  my  pur- 
pose, if  I  have  not  led  the  reader  to  observe  that  Baptism,  according 
to  this  idea  of  it,  is  also  the  justification  of  many  of  those  Quaker, 

18 


270  SIGNS  OF  A 

Protestant,  Philosophical  principles,  which  were  considered  in  the 
first  part — one  step  towards  the  satisfaction  of  that  great  idea  of  a 
Church,  one,  indivisible  and  imperishable,  to  which  the  Romanist 
clings  writh  such  honourable  tenacity. 

That  man  is  a  creature  prone  to  sense,  rising  above  it  by  virtue 
of  a  union  with  an  invisible  teacher,  is  the  doctrine  of  Quakerism. 
Baptism  embodies  that  doctrine,  and  converts  it,  as  Fox  wished 
that  it  should  be  converted,  from  a  mere  doctrine  into  a  living  fact. 
The  only  foundation,  says  the  Calvinist,  for  faithful  action  and  for 
sound  hope,  is  the  belief  that  we  are  God's  elect  children.  Bap- 
tism offers  to  men  that  foundation ;  it  tells  them  that  they  are 
chosen  of  God,  and  precious.  It  makes  this  foundation  what  Calvin 
and  all  earnest  Calvinists  have  felt  that  it  ought  to  be,  not  de- 
pendent upon  our  feelings,  apprehensions,  and  discoveries,  but  on 
the  will  and  word  of  God.  At  the  same  time  the  distinction  which 
it  draws  between  the  new  and  the  old  man,  the  man  in  Christ  who 
alone  can  be  raised  and  glorified,  and  the  old  man  which  is  to  be 
utterly  abolished,  is  a  far  finer,  clearer,  more  practical  distinction 
than  any  which  the  exclusive  Calvinist  has  been  able  to  reach.  It 
denounces  the  unclean  living  into  which  the  believer  in  an  absolute 
separate  election  for  him  is  in  such  danger  of  falling,  as  absolutely  in- 
compatible with  the  knowledge  and  enjoyment  of  God  which  is  eter- 
nal life  ;  and  yet  it  does  not  treat  any  living  man  as  lying  beyond  the 
pale  of  God's  covenant.  Philosophers  say  that  man  can  only  be 
that  or  do  that  which  is  according  to  his  constitution ;  he  cannot 
be  made  by  some  miraculous  process  something  else  than  he  is; 
or,  if  he  can,  that  power  must  be  an  injurious  one.  Baptism  de- 
clares man's  true  and  right  constitution  to  be  that  of  union  wTith 
God,  and  separation  from  Him  to  be  a  violation  of  that  only  order 
according  to  which,  as  reason  and  experience  alike  show,  he  can 
live.  It  is  a  fact  that  men  are  living  anomalously ;  it  is  their  own 
testimony  that  in  doing  so  they  are  following  their  natures.  Bap- 
tism declares  that  those  who  will  are  taken  out  of  that  inconsistent 
condition  to  which  they  are  prone,  and  are  taken  into  a  reasonable 
condition,  in  which  they  may  live  so  long  as  they  remember  the 
covenant  of  God.  Finally,  Romanism  demands  that  by  some  di- 
rect, visible,  permanent  token,  which  all  may  acknowledge,  it  shall 
be  felt  that  God  has  established  the  true,  divine,  Catholic  body 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


271 


upon  earth ;  that  it  is  the  same  from  age  to  age  ;  that  the  mem- 
bers are  brought  under  a  condition  of  divine  and  spiritual  disci- 
pline, are  invested  with  mighty  privileges,  are  laid  under  mighty 
responsibilities,  are  trained  for  a  high  and  glorious  condition.  Of 
this  demand,  Baptism  is  the  accomplishment,  in  a  larger,  fuller 
sense,  than  the  Romanist  will  at  all  admit.  By  this  sign  we  claim 
him,  and  hundreds  of  thousands  in  the  East  and  West,  whom  he 
has  anathematized  to  be  members  of  the  Church  and  body  of 
Christ ;  by  this  sign  we  protest  against  him  and  them,  when  by 
any  acts  or  any  theories  they  degrade  the  spirituality,  or  narrow 
the  universality,  of  that  fellowship  into  which  they  have  been  ad- 
mitted, and  so  (as  far  as  in  them  lies)  make  void  the  covenant  and 
the  purpose  of  God. 

I  wish  now  to  consider  whether  there  be  any  other  notorious 
facts  which  can  only  be  explained  on  the  same  principle  as  this  of 
the  existence  of  Baptism  ;  facts  appearing  on  the  face  of  them  to 
import  that  there  is  a  spiritual  and  universal  constitution  of  society 
for  mankind  ;  facts  denied  to  have  that  significance  by  a  number 
of  warring  parties;  facts  which  establish  their  claim  to  be  what 
they  seem  to  be,  by  the  help  which  they  afford  us  in  justifying 
and  realizing  the  leading  principles  of  each  of  these  parties,  and  in 
reconciling  them  with  each  other.  The  first  which  presents  itself 
is  this : 

There  is  actually  found  at  this  present  day,  in  every  Christian 
country,  a  certain  document  called  a  Creed.  It  is  not  necessary  to 
inquire  minutely  at  what  time  it  was  formed.  Let  it  be  admitted 
that  there  is  an  obscurity  over  its  origin ;  that  we  cannot  say  who 
put  it  into  that  shape  in  which  we  now  see  it.  From  whatever 
quarter  it  may  have  come,  here  it  is.  It  has  lasted  through  a  great 
many  storms  and  revolutions.  The  Roman  empire  has  passed  away ; 
modern  European  society  has  risen  out  of  its  ruins.  Political  sys- 
tems have  been  established  and  overthrown  ;  religious  systems 
have  been  established  and  overthrown.  Even  the  physical  world 
has  undergone  mighty  alterations,  and  our  conception  of  its  laws 
is  altogether  changed.  The  very  languages  which  were  spoken 
in  all  parts  of  the  world  when  the  Gospel  was  first  preached,  have 
given  place  to  others ;  but  this,  "I  believe,"  remains.  It  is  precisely 
what  it  was,  to  say  the  very  least,  twelve  hundred  years  ago. 


272 


SIGNS  OF  A 


During  that  time  it  has  not  been  lying  hid  in  the  closet  of  some 
antiquarian.  It  has  been  repeated  by  the  peasants  and  children  of 
the  different  lands  into  which  it  has  come.  It  has  been  given  to 
them  as  a  record  of  facts  with  which  they  had  as  much  to  do  as 
any  noble.  In  most  parts  of  Europe  it  has  been  repeated  publicly 
every  day  in  the  year ;  and  though  it  has  been  thus  hawked  about, 
and,  as  men  would  say,  vulgarized,  the  most  earnest  and  thought- 
ful men  in  different  countries,  different  periods,  different  stages  of 
civilization,  have  felt  that  it  connected  itself  with  the  most  per- 
manent part  of  their  being,  that  it  had  to  do  with  each  of  them 
personally,  and  that  it  was  the  symbol  of  that  humanity  which 
they  shared  with  their  brethren.  Reformers  who  have  been  en- 
gaged in  conflict  with  all  the  prevailing  systems  of  their  age,  have 
gone  back  to  this  old  form  of  words,  and  have  said  they  lived  to 
reassert  the  truths  which  it  embodied.  Men  on  sick  beds,  martyrs 
at  the  stake,  have  said  that  because  they  held  it  fast,  they  could 
look  death  in  the  face.  And,  to  sink  much  lower,  yet  to  say  what 
may  strike  many  as  far  more  wronderful,  there  are  many  in  this 
day,  who,  having  asked  the  different  philosophers  of  their  own  and 
of  past  times  what  they  could  do  in  helping  them  to  understand 
the  world,  to  fight  against  its  evils,  to  love  their  fellow  men,  are 
ready  to  declare  that  in  this  child's  creed  they  have  found  the  se- 
cret which  these  philosophers  could  not  give  them,  and  w  hich,  by 
God's  grace,  they  shall  not  take  away  from  them. 

Now  a  man  who  has  noticed  these  facts,  and  has  settled  it  in  his 
mind  that,  whatever  they  mean,  they  must  mean  something,  would 
certainly  wish  to  inquire  into  the  nature  of  this  document  which  has 
been  diffused  so  widely,  has  lasted  so  long,  and  has  seemed  to  so 
many  different  persons  of  much  value.  He  will  find,  I  think,  that 
it  differs  from  all  the  digests  of  doctrines,  whether  religious  or  phi- 
losophical, which  he  has  ever  seen.  A  man  is  speaking  in  it. 
The  form  of  it  is,  I  believe.  That  wThich  is  believed  in  is  not  a 
certain  scheme  of  divinity,  but  a  name — a  Father,  who  has  made 
the  heaven  and  the  earth  :  his  Son,  our  Lord,  who  has  been  con- 
ceived, born,  and  died,  and  been  buried,  and  gone  down  into  hell, 
who  has  ascended,  and  is  at  the  right  hand  of  God,  who  will  come 
to  judge  the  world  :  a  Holy  Spirit  who  has  establish!  d  a  holy  uni- 
versal Church,  who  makes  men  a  communion  of  saints,  who  is  the 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


273 


witness  and  power  whereby  they  receive  forgiveness  of  sin,  who  shall 
quicken  their  mortal  bodies,  who  enables  them  to  receive  everlast- 
ing life.  The  Creed  is  evidently  an  act  of  allegiance  or  affiance ; 
and  since  it  has  ever  been  connected  with  Baptism,  one  must  sup- 
pose that  from  Baptism  it  derives  its  interpretation.  If  by  that 
act  we  are  acknowledged  as  spiritual  creatures,  united  to  a  spirit- 
ual Being,  by  this  act  we  claim  our  spiritual  position,  we  assert  our 
union  with  that  Being.  The  name  into  which  we  are  adopted  there, 
is  the  name  we  confess  here.  Those  acts  which,  having  been  done 
for  all  mankind,  were  the  warrant  for  our  particular  admission  into 
the  covenant,  are  the  acts  which  we  here  proclaim  to  be  the 
warrant  of  our  faith  and  our  fellowship.  So  far  the  form  is  consist- 
ent with  its  apparent  object.  But  is  it  also  consistent  with  the  idea 
of  Christ's  kingdom  which  the  Bible  developes  to  us  ?  There  we 
found  the  primary  postulate  of  such  a  kingdom  to  be  a  condescen- 
sion of  God  to  man,  a  cognizance  taken  of  the  creature  by  the 
Creator ;  the  second,  an  apprehension  of  God  by  men,  a  recogni- 
tion of  the  Creator  by  the  creature.  By  grace  are  ye  saved  ;  by 
faith  are  ye  saved.  The  position  is  freely  given ;  a  position  of 
union  and  fellowship  with  another,  a  position  of  self-renunciation  : 
the  power  is  given  wherewith  to  claim  it ;  then  comes  the  claim 
itself.  Such  seems  to  be  the  testimony  of  Scripture  :  and  the  re- 
lation in  which  the  Creed  stands  to  Baptism,  and  their  common  re- 
lation to  that  name  and  that  kingdom  which  Scripture  is  reveal- 
ing, surely  expounds,  in  a  remarkable  way,  that  testimony. 

But  there  is  another  creed  possessing  apparently  equal  authority 
with  the  one  of  which  1  have  spoken,  adopted  perhaps  into  earlier 
use  in  the  Eastern  part  of  Christendom,  and  recognised  by  the 
Western  ever  since  the  age  of  Constantine.  If  it  should  be  found 
that  these  two  creeds  clash  with  each  other,  or  that  they  are  not 
constructed  upon  the  same  principle,  or  that  they  do  not  both  con- 
nect themselves  with  the  idea  of  which  we  have  spoken,  the  evi- 
dence from  the  preservation  of  either  would  certainly  be  weakened. 
Or  if,  these  differences  not  appearing,  it  should  seem  that  one  could 
be  conveniently  substituted  for  the  other,  that  there  is  nothing  dis- 
tinct and  peculiar  in  each,  one  might  be  puzzled  to  account  for  the  . 
existence  of  both,  at  least  as  universal  symbols.  To  see  whether 
any  of  these  objections  apply,  I  would  urge  the  reader  to  a 


274 


SIGNS  OF  A 


thoughtful  comparison  of  the  two  documents.  First  I  would  ask 
him  whether  in  reading  that  which  we  call  the  Apostles'  Creed, 
considering  it  as  a  declaration  of  the  name  into  which  he  is  baptiz- 
ed, he  do  not  feel  that  it  is  meant  to  proclaim  the  distinct  person- 
ality of  the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  Spirit,  as  signified  by  certain 
relations  in  which  they  have  been  manifested  to  men?  Then 
whether  another  question  do  not  arise  in  his  mind,  which  he  may 
perceive  from  history  has  arisen  also  in  other  men's  minds  : — Is 
there  not  a  more  mysterious  and  awful  relation  implied  and  prefig- 
ured in  these  ?  Does  not  the  name  express  such  a  relation  ?  Is 
not  the  knowledge  of  this,  as  the  ground  of  those  relations,  part 
of  the  revelation  which  has  been  vouchsafed  to  us ;  one  of  the 
deep  things  which  cannot  indeed  be  understood,  (for  who  under- 
stands the  mystery  of  his  own  ordinary  human  relations  ?)  but 
which  lies  so  immediately  beneath  those  facts  which  most  concern 
us  all,  is  so  needful  as  the  interpretation  and  reconciliation  of  those 
facts,  has  been  so  eagerly  felt  after  in  all  ages,  that  if  it  be  not 
disclosed  to  the  heart  and  reason  of  man,  they  will  be  tormented 
with  such  dreams  and  imaginations  concerning  it,  as  must  make 
the  acknowledgment  of  the  Divine  Unity  impossible  ? 

Now  the  JVicene  Creed  agrees  with  the  Apostles'  altogether  in 
its  form  and  principle.  It  is  still  1  believe;  it  is  still  belief  in  a 
name,  and  not  in  notions.  It  differs  in  this,  that  it  unites  with  a 
declaration  of  the  divine  relations  to  men,  a  declaration  of  the  re- 
lations in  the  Godhead. 

To  every  peasant  and  child  it  speaks  of  this  marvellous  subject. 
Certainly  a  strange  fact,  doubly  strange  when  one  knows  how 
much  it  has  been  the  tendency  of  teachers  and  priests  in  all  ages 
to  believe  that  only  a  few  initiated  persons  are  fit  to  know  any 
thing  which  concerns  the  name  and  nature  of  God;  and  how 
much  this  tendency  did  actually  mingle  itself  with  the  awe  and  rev- 
erence of  those  ages  by  which  these  creeds  have  been  transmitted 
to  us.  That  the  doctors  of  the  Church  should  have  allowed  the 
Aposles'  Creed  to  be  heard  in  every  cottage  is  strange ;  that  they 
should  not  have  said  that  this  deeper  creed,  though  embodying  the 
,  principles  and  date  of  the  other,  was  only  for  theologians,  is 
scarcely  credible ;  yet  so  it  was.  Now  if  it  were  the  purpose  of 
God  that  his  name  should  be  revealed  to  men ;  if  his  name,  which 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  275 

seems  to  most  of  us  to  be  connected  with  the  highest  and  most 
esoterical  abstractions,  be  really  the  only  ground  of  a  universal  so- 
ciety, we  can  interpret  these  facts.  What  other  explanations  have 
been  found  for  them,  I  wish  now  to  consider. 

Objections. — The  Quaker. 

To  the  Quaker  it  seems  quite  evident  that  the  invention  of  creeds 
is  one  manifest  symptom  of  the  working  of  that  mystery  of  iniquity 
which  has  been  always  arising  to  counterfeit  and  to  destroy  the 
kingdom  of  Christ.  The  faith  which  a  Christian  man  exercises  in 
the  Divine  Invisible  Teacher  is  entirely  of  an  inward  spiritual  kind. 
Here  it  is  thrown  outward,  turned  into  propositions,  made  the  lan- 
guage of  a  whole  body  or  congregation,  reduced  into  a  nullity. 

One  side  of  this  objection  I  considered  when  I  was  speaking  of 
the  differences  between  the  Quaker  and  the  Lutheran.  It  is  pre- 
cisely the  objection  to  the  acknowledgment  of  the  manifested 
Word,  and  arises  from  a  desire,  more  or  less  consciously  entertain- 
ed, to  divorce  the  idea  of  a  spiritual  object  from  that  of  an  actual 
person. 

There  is,  however,  mixed  with  this  radical  dislike,  a  feeling  of  a 
most  different  kind — a  feeling  that  mere  conceptions,  opinions,  no- 
tions, are  most  inadequate  to  the  wants  of  a  spiritual  being,  mere 
pictures  and  poor  pictures  of  that  which  is  real.  To  this  doctrine 
I  assent  most  heartily  ;  there  is  none  which  I  have  been  so  anxious 
to  maintain  throughout  this  book.  The  problem  how  we  may  be 
delivered  from  opinions  and  notions,  how  we  may  rise  out  of  them 
into  another  region,  is  the  very  one  which  I  am  investigating. 
The  History  of  Quakerism  I  have  found  most  helpful  to  me  in  the 
inquiry— at  least  in  a  negative  way;  for  it  shows  us,  I  think,  that 
there  is  no  such  certain  and  direct  road  into  mere  notionality,  as 
that  of  rejecting  all  common  and  united  forms  of  utterance.  The 
apprehensions  and  conceits  of  each  man's  mind,  being  those  which 
he  regards  as  alone  sacred,  become  his  tyrants ;  and  so  far  as  he 
is  able  to  give  expression  to  those  apprehensions  and  conceits, 
they  become  the  tyrants  over  the  minds  of  others.  In  no  society 
are  there  so  many  traditional  phrases  which  have  had  a  meaning 
once  and  have  lost  it,  or  are  rapidly  losing  it,  as  in  the  Quaker  so- 
ciety ;  in  no  society  is  there  greater  bondage  to  these  phrases,  a 


276 


SIGNS  OF  A 


greater  dread  of  exchanging  them  for  any  equivalents.  And, 
therefore,  without  pressing  the  point  again,  that  by  this  means  all 
universality  is  lost,  that  a  body  which  professed  to  be  for  mankind 
became  in  a  very  few  years  the  narrowest  and  most  peculiar  of 
sects,  1  maintain  that  the  experiment  of  dispensing  with  a  confes- 
sion as  a  means  of  promoting  spirituality  has  been  made,  and  has 
failed  utterly.  Once  more  I  claim  our  strongest  opponents  as  wit- 
nesses in  our  favour.  By  the  character  of  their  arguments,  and  by 
the  results  of  their  practice,  they  have  increased  the  probability 
that  if  there  is  to  be  a  kingdom  of  Christ  on  earth,  a  cret'd,  which 
should  present  a  living  object  as  revealed  in  living  acts  to  the  faith 
of  all  men,  would  be  one  of  the  divinely- appointed  means  of  its 
preservation. 

Modern  Protestant  Objections. 

But  the  moment  we  use  the  phrase,  divinely -appointed  means, 
the  modern  Protestant,  or  Evangelical,  steps  in,  and  demands  how 
we  dare  to  claim  such  a  dignity  as  this  for  a  mere  human  composi- 
tion, a  mere  ecclesiastical  tradition  ?  The  Bible  is  the  divine 
document;  it  is  a  gross  intrusion  upon  the  rights  of  the  Bible 
to  assert  that  character  for  any  other. 

I  would  beseech  the  person  who  proposes  this  objection,  to  ask 
himself  whether  he  seriously  believes  that  the  Bible  is  the  only 
document,  the  only  thing — which  has  been  preserved  to  men  by 
divine  care  and  providence  ?  If  he  will  say  boldly,  "  I  do  think 
this,"  all  debate  is  at  an  end.  We  are  reasoning  with  a  person  who 
is  separated  by  the  very  narrowest  plank  from  absolute  Atheism  ; 
a  plank  so  narrow  and  so  fragile,  that  in  a  very  short  time,  it  will 
be  broken  down.  For  that  he  should  believe  this,  and  yet  con- 
tinue for  any  length  of  time  to  acknowledge  a  book  which  is  cha- 
racterized by  nothing  so  much  as  its  strong  assertion,  that  whatever 
men  possess  they  are  to  attribute  to  God's  care  and  providence,  is 
impossible.  But  supposing  he  disclaims,  as  he  no  doubt  will,  very 
indignantly,  any  such  wicked  hypothesis,  I  would  beg  him  next 
calmly  to  consider  what  assertion  of  mine  it  is  which  offends  him. 
Have  I  said  that  the  creed  is  a  substitute  for  the  Bible  ?  Have  I 
urged  that  the  creed  is  necessary,  because  it  supplies  information 
which  the  Bible  does  not  supply  ?    Have  I  said  that  the  creed  cor- 

• 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  277 

rects  or  qualifies  any  thing  which  the  Bible  asserts  1  I  have  main- 
tained none  of  these  propositions.  1  have  said,  "  I  find  a  document 
which  has  lasted  for  eighteen  centuries.  It  is  a  document  which 
explains  to  me  the  meaning  and  purpose  of  the  Bible,  which 
shows  me  that  it  has  done  what  it  proposed  to  do.  As  a  declara- 
tion of  the  .  name  of  God,  it  proclaims  that  that  which  the  Bible 
undertakes  to  reveal,  has  been  revealed  ;  as  an  act  of  faith  on  the 
part  of  men,  it  proclaims  that  that  faiih  by  which  the  Bible  af- 
firms we  are  saved,  can  be  exercised." 

Is  the  doubt,  then,  why  the  creed,  seeing  that  it  only  affirms  the 
principles  and  facts  of  the  Bible,  should  be  necessary  to  those  who 
already  possess  the  Bible  ?  The  history  of  Protestantism  gives  the 
answer.  The  Bible,  in  the  hands  of  its  orthodox  teachers,  was 
reduced  into  a  set  of  dry  propositions,  about  the  limitations  of 
which  they  were  perpetually  fighting.  The  Bible,  in  the  hands  of 
its  Unitarian  and  Rationalistic  teachers,  was  reduced  into  a  set  of 
dreary  truisms,  not  worthy  to  be  fought  about.  You  talk  about 
the  Bible,  and  the  Bible  only;  but  when  you  are  brought  to  the 
proof,  you  give  us,  in  place  of  it,  dry  husks  of  logic  or  pompous 
inanities,  dignified  with  the  name  of  simple  truths.  We  want  the 
Bible  as  it  is,  in  its  life  and  reality  ;  and  experience  shows  that 
we  shall  not  have  it,  if  we  have  not  some  witness  of  the  principles 
which  it  embodies. 

Again,  the  doctrine  that  faith  justifies  is,  as  Protestants  affirm, 
the  articulus  stantis  et  cadentis  ecclesice.  So  said  Luther,  and 
looked  to  the  creed  as  the  great  witness  of  what  he  said— as  that 
"  confession  of  the  mouth  unto  salvation,"  in  which  "  the  heart's 
belief  unto  righteousness"  is  expressed  and  fulfilled.  Such  lan- 
guage seems  to  the  modern  Protestant  dry,  cold,  and  carnal ;  what 
is  the  warm,  juicy,  and  spiritual  language,  which  he  has  substituted 
for  it?  History  replies,  endless  controversies  about  the  nature, 
mode,  effect,  signs,  attributes,  qualifications  of  a  living  or  dead 
faith  ;  controversies  in  which  nothing  is  forgotten,  save  the  object 
of  the  faith  and  the  person  who  exercises  it ;  controversies  which 
fill  the  hearts  of  humble  Christians  with  bewilderment  and  des- 
pair ;  controversies  in  which  the  exercised  dialectician  detects  on 
each  side  great  acuteness,  admirable  ingenuity,  but  regrets  that  in 
both  the  favourite  argumentative  figure  should  be  the  petilio  prin- 


278  SIGNS  OF  A 

cipii.  Am  I  then  wrong  in  claiming  the  pure  Protestant  as  a 
witness  that  this  Catholic  creed  is  an  essential  sign  of  the  kingdom 
of  Christ  ? 

Rationalistic  Objections. 

The  rationalist  denies  that  the  creed  can  be  a  permanent  sym- 
bol of  human  fellowship,  because  it  rests  upon  the  acknowledg- 
ment of  certain  events.  "  Now,  assuredly,"  he  says,  "  these  events 
could  not  have  met  with  so  much  credence,  if  they  had  not  pointed 
to  certain  great  principles  or  ideas  which  are  characteristic  of  us 
as  members  of  a  race.  They  do  point  most  clearly  to  the  sense 
which  there  is  in  all  men  of  a  something  divine ;  to  the  possibility 
that  this  should  overcome  evil,  sorrow,  and  death ;  to  the  feel- 
ing that  it  must  submit  to  sorrow  and  death  as  a  way  to  that 
victory.  This,  which  is  the  essence  of  the  creed,  is  no  doubt  uni- 
versal ;  it  may  be  traced  in  heathen  and  Jewish  records ;  it  has 
survived  all  the  fables  with  which,  in  both,  it  is  encompassed. 
There  is  therefore  every  probability  that  it  will  survive  what  are 
called  the  facts  of  Christianity  likewise.  And  this  is  more  likely, 
because  every  day  the  documents  in  which  those  facts  are  record- 
ed, are  subjected  to  a  more  sifting  analysis,  and  because  every  day 
the  evidence  in  the  former  seems  to  be  less  decisive." 

In  the  former  part  of  this  book  I  have  considered  the  general 
meaning  and  effect  of  this  argument.  1  have  endeavored  to  show 
how  true  the  assertion  is  upon  which  it  is  grounded,  that  the  belief  of 
a  divine  humanity  has  existed  in  all  ages — that  it  has  taken  innumer- 
able forms.  I  have  maintained  that  all  these  forms  have  presumed 
the  existence  of  some  more  perfect  form ;  that  they  never  have  com- 
passed the  end  at  which  they  aimed ;  that  they  have  not  revealed 
The  Man,  the  head  of  the  race,  while  nevertheless  they  have  tes- 
tified, one  and  all,  with  more  or  less  distinctness  in  proportion  as 
the  light  which  they  endeavored  to  concentrate  was  more  or  less 
clear,  that  such  a  one  there  must  be.  When  a  great  man  assumed 
to  be  this,  he  became  a  tyrant  and  oppressor,  in  our  Lord's  words, 
a  thief  and  a  robber — not  the  asserter  of  humanity,  but  the  denier 
of  it.  You  do  not  therefore  advance  one  step  in  weakening  the 
authority  of  this  creed,  by  producing  instances  of  this  worship 
from  ancient  or  modern  history,  or  by  dwelling  upon  the  tendency 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  279 

which  they  so  manifestly  indicate.  The  more  you  can  produce  of 
them  the  better ;  the  more  they  are  examined  the  better.  They 
prove  that  there  is  such  an  idea  in  humanity  as  you  speak  of ; 
they  prove  just  as  strongly,  that,  with  the  idea,  humanity  can  never 
be  satisfied ;  they  declare  that  the  idea  is  the  idea  of  an  actual 
living  Being,  of  a  perfect  Being ;  of  one  who  should  prove  his  per- 
fectness  by  entering  entirely  into  the  lowest  condition  into  which 
man  has  ever  entered,  and  actually  rising  into  the  highest  of  which 
man  has  ever  dreamed.  If  these  two  elements  of  the  lowest  hu- 
miliation, of  the  greatest  exaltation,  be  not  combined — if  they  are 
not  combined  in  acts — the  idea  is  not  fulfilled,  it  waits  to  be  ful- 
filled ;  that  is  to  say,  we  wait  for  a  person  who  shall  do  precisely 
those  acts  of  which  the  creed  speaks.  Any  others  will  not  avail ;  any 
others  will  not  be  universal  enough,  will  not  be  the  testimonies 
that  He  who  performs  them  is  the  Man.  We  are  asked  then  for 
the  evidences  of  the  creed.  Our  answer  is ;  This — You  have 
shown  why  it  has  been  believed,  what  need  there  was  in  the  deep- 
est heart  of  mankind,  that  it  should  be  believed.  It  was  believed, 
not  upon  the  evidence  of  documents,  but  upon  the  simple  procla- 
mation of  men  who  had  the  whole  universe  against  them.  They 
said  to  men,  Christ  must  be ;  Christ  you  have  been  asking  for  in 
every  land,  through  every  age  :  Jesus  the  crucified  is  the  Christ. 
The  answers  were  three  :  The  first  was, — There  are  a  thousand 
Christs ;  every  kingdom  and  district  has  its  own.  It  would  have 
been  satisfactory  if  men  had  not  listened  to  that  other  proclama- 
tion ;  "  You  are  members  of  one  body,  and  therefore  you  need  one 
Head."  But  they  did  listen  to  it ;  they  felt  it  to  be  true ;  therefore 
the  thousand  could  not  prevail  against  the  one.  No  wonder  this 
answer  should  be  revived  now ;  no  wonder  that  when  the  sense  of 
being  one  body  has  so  practically  forsaken  us,  the  principle  which 
is  its  counterpart  should  be  so  readily  abandoned.  But  I  hope  I 
have  shown  that  there  never  was  so  strong  a  cry  for  a  universal 
and  united  fellowship  as  in  this  day  of  division ;  a  cry  proceeding 
from  so  many  opposite  corners  of  the  earth,  from  so  many  different 
kinds  of  men.  This  reply,  then,  if  it  failed  once,  will  not  prevail 
now.  The  second  answer  was, — "  There  is  an  ideal  Christ  under 
these  different  Christs ;  and  it  is  this,  not  them,  you  are  to  wor- 
ship."   The  people  admitted  the  doctrine  of  the  philosopher, 


280 


SIGNS  OF  A 


but  they  said,  "  This  is  the  ideal  Christ,  and  here  he  is  manifested 
to  us."  That  this  argument  should  be  repeated  in  a  day  when  ab- 
stract notions  have  been  so  much  substituted  for  living  truths,  can- 
not be  surprising.  Yet  we  have  seen,  I  think,  that  there  was  never 
more  impatience  of  these  abstractions,  or  a  more  vehement  de- 
mand for  realities,  embodied  realities,  than  at  this  very  time.  If 
then  there  be  an  idea  of  a  universal  Prince  in  men's  minds,  they 
will  either  continue  to  believe  that  this  idea  has  been  realized  in 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  or  they  will  seek  a  realization  of  it  in  some 
other  person.  And  thus  we  arrive  at  the  third  answer  which  was 
made  to  the  proclamation  of  the  Creed  in  the  first  ages,  and  which 
has  been  made  so  often  since ;  "  This  crucified  man  is  not  the  per- 
fect Being  we  look  for;  we  want  a  warrior,  a  philosopher,  a  poet, 
possessing  qualities  altogether  different  from  those  which  are 
brought  out  in  the  Gospel  narrative,  though  we  may  acknowledge 
that  these  too  have  a  certain  value  of  their  own."  Such  has  for 
twelve  centuries  been  the  belief  of  a  large  portion  of  the  w^orld 
which  was  once  Christian.  Another  portion  of  it  has  declared 
that  they  see  in  the  Cross  the  symbol  of  love  triumphing  through 
suffering,  in  the  Crescent  only  of  power  claiming  dominion  over 
weakness  ;  that  the  first  is  a  bond  of  mutual  fellowship  among 
the  members  of  a  suffering  race  ;  the  other  the  pledge  of  a  univer- 
sal slavery.  That  the  spirit  of  the  Cross  prevails  very  little  in  the 
nations  which  still  profess  to  honor  it ;  that  self-sacrifice  is  very 
generally  and  very  systematically  denied  to  be  the  law  of  our  be- 
ing, most  of  us  are  ready  with  shame  to  confess.  And  therefore 
the  expectation  is  surely  very  reasonable,  that  the  experiment 
which  was  so  successful  in  the  nations  of  the  East,  will  be  made, 
under  other  conditions,  in  the  West.  We  have  had  many  prepar- 
atory Antichrists,  many  sovereigns  reigning  by  the  strength  of 
mind  and  will,  and  scorning  all  other  right — why  should  we  doubt 
that  this  image  will  be  yet  more  completely  manifested  ? 

May  God  preserve  those  who  live  in  the  day  when  it  is  mani- 
fested to  the  world,  and  when  the  world  goes  wandering  after  it !  In 
that  day  when  intellect  and  w  ill  shall  be  utterly  crushed  under  the 
car  of  the  idol  which  they  have  set  up ;  in  that  day  when  the  poor 
man  shall  cry,  and  there  shall  be  no  helper,  may  God  teach  his 
saints  to  proclaim  these  words  to  the  sons  of  men  :   He  was  born 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


281 


of  the  Virgin  ;  He  suffered  under  Pontiles  Pi/ate  ;  He  was  cruci- 
fied, dead,  and  buried,  and  went  down  into  hell ;  He  rose  again  cn 
th>>  third  day  ;  He  ascended  on  high  ;  He  sitteth  on  the  right  hand 
of  God  ;  He  shall  come  to  judge  the  quick  and  the  dead.  May 
they  be  enabled  to  say,  This  is  our  God  ;  we  have  waited  for  Him. 

The  Romish  System. 

Any  one  who  maintains  the  creed  to  be  an  heirloom  of  the 
Church,  which  has  been  preserved  to  men  by  the  providence  of 
God,  and  which  each  generation  of  her  members  is  bound  to  watch 
over,  as  an  essential  sign  and  necessary  safeguard  of  her  existence, 
may  be  said  to  acknowledge  the  authority  and  value  of  a  Tradi- 
tion. He  must  be,  I  should  think,  a  rather  feeble  and  cowaidly 
thinker,  who  is  afraid  of  the  name  after  he  has  recognised  the 
thing ;  the  creed  he  believes  has  been  handed  down,  and  that 
which  has  been  handed  down  is  a  tradition.  But  the  Romanist  is 
the  ureat  apologist  for  tradition  :  how  in  principle  can  one  who 
attaches  this  kind  of  value  to  the  Creed  differ  from  the  Romanist? 

It  is  not  necessary  to  inquire  to  what  extent  any  given  Roman- 
ist would  approve  of  language  like  the  following  :  That  Scrip- 
ture is  not  of  itself  suffcint  to  make  known  all  the  system  which  the 
Church  requires  ;  that  the  notions,  opinions,  and  explanations  of  the 
doctors  of  the  Church,  partly  elucidatory  of  Scripture,  partly  as 
supplying  that  which  is  deficient,  and  was  meant  to  be  deficient  in 
it,  are  authoritative  and  necessary  ;  that  these,  together  with  Scrip- 
ture, constitute  the  ecclesiastical  doctrine — 1  say  I  shall  not  inquire 
whether  any  particular  Romanist  writer  may  have  objected  to  this 
statement  ;  it  will  be  allowed,  I  think,  that  so  far  as  he  did,  so  far 
he  was  rejecting,  not  certain  excesses  or  exaggerations  of  th*. 
Romanist  theory,  but  a  characterestic  and  integral  portion  of  it. 

1  think  if  this  statement  be  compared  with  the  view  which  I 
have  taken  of  the  Creed,  it  will  be  seen  that  they  are  not  exactly 
the  same.  It  will  be  admitted  that  there  are  points  of  difference; 
that  at  all  events  I  do  not  choose  to  use  the  phrases  which  Roman- 
ists use.  But  is  the  difference  one  of  terms  only,  or  is  it  a  vital 
one,  indicating  an  entirely  different  conception  of  the  purposes  for 
which  this  document,  and  the  other  documenls  bequeathed  to  us 
by  antiquity,  exist  ?    I  shall  reply  to  this  question  by  translating 


282 


SIGNS  OF  A 


my  words,  "  The  creed  is  the  sign  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  so- 
ciety," into  others  which  I  believe  to  be  equivalent — "  The  creed 
is  the  document  which  has  served  as  a  protection  to  the  meaning  of 
the  Scriptures  against  the  tendency  which  the  Church  doctors  in 
different  ages  have  exhibited  to  disturb  and  mangle  them.  The 
creed  has  served  as  a  protection  to  the  humbler  members  of  the 
Church  against  the  inclination  which  the  Church  doctors  of  differ- 
ent ages  have  manifested  to  rob  them  of  their  inheritance,  and  to 
appropriate  it  to  themselves." 

These  propositions  I  have  already  illustrated,  in  reference  to  the 
doctors  of  reformed  bodies;  I  have  maintained  that  the  Bible, 
left  to  their  mercies,  would  have  been  utterly  deprived  of  its  signifi- 
cance ;  and  that  had  we  been  left  to  their  mercies,  we  should  have 
been  fed  with  stones  rather  than  with  bread.  In  making  these  re- 
marks, I  speak  only  of  an  inclination,  at  times  a  most  pre- 
dominating inclination,  which  has  been  discernible  in  these 
teachers.  I  do  not  mean  that  there  have  not  been  many  coun- 
teracting influences  at  work  both  in  their  own  minds  and  in 
the  minds  of  those  whom  they  addressed.  I  have  asserted  again 
and  again  that  there  have  been  and  are  such  influences  ;  and  that 
the  more  we  consider  the  meaning  and  object  of  the  Reformation, 
the  more  we  shall  discover  of  them.  But  I  do  assert  that  it  is  such 
an  inclination  as  has  needed  a  most  strong  and  divine  power  to  re- 
sist it ;  and  that  power  which  delights  to  work  by  humble  instru- 
ments, has,  I  believe,  been  exerted  in  a  great  measure  through  this 
child's  creed.  1  will  now  endeavor  to  show  in  what  sense  and 
under  what  limitations  I  conceive  similar  remarks  are  applicable  to 
those  early  teachers  whom  the  Romanists  and  we  both  profess  to 
honor,  as  well  as  to  the  pontifical  writers,  whom  he  reverences, 
and  whom  we,  I  trust,  do  not  despise. 

It  was  the  great  glory  of  the  greatest  philosopher  of  antiquity 
to  affirm,  What  man  wants  is  a  knowledge  of  that  which  is  ;  he 
cannot  be  content  with  opinions  and  notions  about  that  which  may 
be.  His  being  will  not  rest  upon  this.  Society  will  not  rest  upon 
it.  The  ground  of  both  must  be  a  reality,  an  invisible  spiritual 
reality — not  any  scheme  or  theory  about  this  matter  or  that.  The 
first  Fathers  of  the  Church  had  the  strongest  sympathy  with  this 
philosopher,  precisely  because  he  affirmed  this.    They  felt  that  he 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


283 


was  asking  for  the  very  thing  which  a  revelation,  if  it  were  a  rev- 
elation, ought  to  give.  They  felt  we  have  a  revelation  not  of  certain 
notions  and  dogmas  about  certain  things,  but  a  revelation  of  God 
himself.  When  I  say  they  felt  this,  I  mean  that  it  was  the  deep- 
est, strongest  conviction  of  their  minds,  the  one  which  their  admi- 
rers have  always  acknowledged  to  constitute  the  great  charm  of 
their  writings.  To  know  God  is  eternal  life.  The  Church  is 
that  society  which  rests  upon  the  Name  and  Unity  of  God,  and 
through  which  they  are  made  known  to  man.  I  ask  any  lover 
of  the  Fathers,  whether  he  will  not  fix  upon  these  as  the  two  great 
principles  which  by  their  words  and  their  lives  they  are  illustrating  ? 

Now  surely,  if  this  be  so,  the  theology  of  the  Fathers  must  be 
most  precious.  They  worked  their  way  through  infinite  confusions 
into  the  heaven  of  these  truths :  God  is — He  is  one — and  his  unity 
is  not  a  dead  material  notion,  but  a  unity  of  life  and  love,  the  foun- 
dation of  all  unity  among  men.  If  we  have  no  sympathy  with 
them — with  those  who  first  saw  the  light  and  rejoiced  in  it — above 
all,  if  we  dare  to  mock  them,  surely  we  must  expect  that  it  will 
become  every  hour  less  clear  to  us  and  to  our  children.  And  what 
if  these  Fathers,  having  the  idea  of  God  ever  before  them,  rather 
merged  those  of  man  and  of  nature  in  it,  than  perceived  that  each 
must  be  distinct,  in  order  that  each  may  preserve  its  proper  relation 
to  the  other ;  may  not  this  very  fault  of  theirs  be  only  an  addition- 
al help  to  us,  if  we  will  use  it  humbly  and  faithfully  ?  Their  works 
are  given  to  students  j  to  them  expressly  and  exclusively.  They 
are  committed,  then,  to  men  who  have  a  peculiar  vocation,  a  pecu- 
liar responsibility  ;  who  need  nothing  so  much  as  to  be  taught  how 
prone  we  all  are  to  worship  idols  of  the  cave  and  idols  of  the  forum  ; 
to  set  up  the  notions  which  are  fashioned  by  our  own  peculiar  tem- 
peraments, or  which  are  popular  in  our  age,  in  place  of  great  princi- 
ples, whereof  they  are  the  false  likenesses ;  to  be  taught  this  in  order 
that  they  may  perceive  the  glory  of  that  which  is  free  and  universal, 
and  be  delivered  from  the  preference  which  our  devil-infected  nature 
conceives  for  that  which  is  esoterical  and  self-exalting.  This  lesson, 
if  it  be  received  at  all,  must  be  received  from  the  examples  of  good 
men,  not  of  bad;  of  those  whose  light  makes  the  darkness  visible, 
not  of  those  in  whom  all  is  dark.  Why,  then,  should  we  deem 
the  Fathers  less  valuable  because  they  are  capable  of  imparting  it  ? 


284 


SIGNS  OF  A 


Alas !  students  did  not  make  this  use  of  the  Fathers  ;  but  just 
that  use  which  they  could  not  have  made  if  they  had  ever  heartily 
admired  that  which  was  most  precious  in  them,  or  had  not  lost  the 
admiration  of  it  through  the  vanity  of  possessing  something  in  which 
other  men  did  not  share.  They  set  up  notions,  opinions,  theories  of 
those  saints  who  had  declared  that  men  are  thirsting,  not  for 
theories,  or  notions,  or  opinions,  but  for  the  living  God,  and  that 
they  must  have  that  thirst  satisfied,  or  perish.  Of  course,  then,  the 
Bible  became  to  the  Patristic,  as  it  did  to  the  Protestant  student,  a 
mere  congeries  of  notions ;  of  course  he  also  proclaimed,  that  to 
ascertain  what  these  notions  are  was  the  great  problem  of  human 
life,  the  necessary  step  to  the  attainment  of  everlasting  salvation. 
But  this  necessary  step  could  not  be  taken  by  men  generally  ;  they 
could  not  find  out  the  true  notions.  The  Fathers  must  help  them. 
They  must  interpret  the  Bible,  and  supply  its  deficiencies.  Still  we 
are  at  fault.  The  Fathers  are  as  unattainable  as  the  Bible.  What 
each  of  them  affirmed,  what  they  agreed  in  affirming,  could  be  as 
little  ascertained,  as  what  each  of  the  writers  of  the  Bible  affirmed, 
or  what  they  agreed  in  affirming.  There  must  then  be  an  authority 
capable  of  pronouncing  on  this  point — a  living  authority.  Where 
was  it  ?  Was  it  the  whole  Church  of  any  given  age,  or  some 
particular  member  of  it  ?  The  first  doctrine  was  plausible,  but 
impracticable ;  the  last,  therefore,  was  adopted.  To  find  the  com- 
mission was  not  difficult  where  the  necessity  for  it  was  clear.  A 
man  was  enthroned  as  the  dogmatist  of  Christendom  ;  he  was  ap- 
pointed to  say,  and  could  say,  what  men  ought  to  think.  Thus 
was  another  stone  added— not,  perhaps,  the  key-stone — to  the 
Romish  system.  But  the  system  was  not  all  that  existed  in  the 
ages  which  gave  it  birth,  and  brought  it  to  maturity.  There  was 
another  element  at  work.  Men  still  repeated  their  Paternosters 
and  Credos;  eminent  men  felt  M  Here  lies  the  deepest  wisdom;  no 
decrees  and  dogmas  can  reach  the  sense  of  the  Scriptures,  the  sense 
of  the  Fathers,  like  this  infantine  lore"  And  so  through  the  very 
heart  of  school  divinity  there  ran  a  stream  of  simple  faith,  a  silent 
acknowledgment  that  the  truth  had  been  revealed,  and  that  the 
infinite  complications  of  our  minds,  the  various  forms  under  w  hich 
we  are  capable  of  beholding  it,  need  not  hinder  us  from  knowing 
it  and  loving  it.    By  degrees  this  faith  became  more  and  more 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


285 


obscured  ;  opinion  became  all  in  all ;  then  corruptions  and  infidelity 
grew  and  flourished  by  the  side  of  increasing  superstition  and  sla- 
very. Still  here  were  holy  and  brave  men,  even  in  the  later 
schools,  who  sought  for  a  truth  beyond  opinions.  The  mystical 
writers  spoke  of  beholding  God,  and  dwelling  in  God.  Ficinus 
and  the  Platonists,  at  the  revival  of  letters,  declared  that  there  was 
a  method  of  seeking  the  substantial  and  the  real.  But  the  "  I  be- 
lieve" changed  the  glorious  hope  of  the  one,  the  philosophical  idea 
of  the  other,  into  a  fact  for  men.  Then  it  became  necessary  for 
Pope  Pius  IV.  to  do  that  openly,  which  had  so  long  been  clone 
covertly — to  set  antiquity  at  defiance,  and  to  invent  a  creed  of  his 
own.  Thanks  be  to  God,  he  could  not  do  this  work  effectually  ! 
In  the  nations  which  acknowledge  his  infallibility,  not  his  creed, 
but  the  Apostles'  is  still  repeated  by  mothers  and  nurses  to  their 
infants,  still  lisped  by  them  in  their  own  language,  still  taught  them 
by  their  priests.  The  words,  surely,  are  not  always  dead  sounds; 
at  all  events  they  may  start,  some  day,  into  life.  Protestants  may 
discover  that  there  is  in  them  the  very  heart  of  that  Reformation 
doctrine  which  the  systems  of  Protestantism  have  been  setting  at 
nought ;  the  Churches  which  seek  for  a  centre  of  unity  by  crouch- 
ing to  Rome,  may  find  in  them,  at  once,  the  bond  of  their  fellow- 
ship, and  the  charter  of  their  liberation  ;  the  Greeks  may  wake  up 
to  the  conviction,  that  centuries  of  alienation  have  been  unable  to 
deprive  them  and  the  West  of  these  common  symbols,  it  cannot  be 
God's  will  that  they  should  be  divided.  What  a  day  will  that  be 
for  the  Catholic  Church !  what  a  day  for  the  Romish  system  ! 


SECTION  III. 

FORMS  OF  WORSHIP. 

Every  traveller  is  ready  to  testify  how  different  the  modes  of 
worship  are  in  the  countries  where  he  has  visited.  They  vary,  he 
says,  with  every  degree  of  latitude.  Within  the  same  district  he 
notices  a  persistency  in  certain  practices  and  in  the  acknowledg- 
ment of  the  traditions  which  have  given  rise  to  them.  Nevertheless 
the  effects  of  Time  may,  he  remarks,  be  traced  almost  as  visibly  as 

19 


286 


SIGNS  OF  A 


those  of  Locality.  If  through  an  invasion,  or  by  any  other  fortu- 
nate accident,  the  habits  of  a  more  cultivated  people  are  brought 
to  bear  upon  an  inferior  one,  the  old  customs  acquire  a  more  rea- 
sonable character ;  by  and  by,  if  the  cultivation  spread,  and  a  par- 
ticular class  do  not  acquire  the  power  of  narrowing  it  to  a  certain 
point,  a  skepticism  respecting  old  traditions  becomes  general.  On 
the  other  hand,  if  a  people  be  left  to  itself,  without  any  of  these 
influences,  their  minds  become  daily  grosser,  and  the  old  supersti- 
tions lose  all  traces  of  the  meaning  and  worth  which  they  might 
have  once  possessed. 

These  remarks,  which  must  be  familiar  to  every  modern  reader, 
are  undoubtedly  derived  from  a  true  observation.  Nor  is  their  ap- 
plication at  all  limited  to  Pagan  or  Mahometan  countries.  I  believe 
that  where  Christianity  is  found,  the  influence  of  locality  and  of 
periods  is  far  more  noticeable  than  elsewhere.  There  is  a  more 
strongly  marked  nationality  in  the  different  countries  of  modern 
Europe  than  in  all  the  rest  of  the  world  at  any  moment  of  its 
existence;  and  that  one  century  differs  more  from  another  in  them 
than  in  the  East,  is  a  truism  which  it  is  almost  foolish  to  utter.  It 
is  equally  certain  (as  liberal  writers  so  continually  assure  us)  that 
the  effect  of  this  nationality  and  these  changes  in  society  upon  reli- 
gious opinion  is  most  striking,  and  that  there  is  no  parallel  to  it  in 
China  or  Hindostan. 

But  if  it  be  so,  is  it  not  remarkable  that  certain  forms  of  wor- 
ship, actually  of  worship,  have  subsisted  through  all  the  revolutions 
to  which  Christendom  has  been  subjected ;  have  defied  the  re- 
straints of  national  customs  and  languages ;  have  stood  their  ground 
against  all  the  varieties  of  opinion  in  reference  to  subjects  human 
and  divine  ? 

Is  it  not  a  strange  thing,  to  take  an  example,  that  we  in  Eng- 
land in  this  nineteenth  century  should  be  using  forms  of  prayer 
which  were  written  by  Greeks  in  the  third  and  fourth  ?  nay,  that 
the  whole  conception  of  our  liturgy  from  beginning  to  end ;  the 
assignment  of  particular  services  to  particular  seasons  of  the  year ; 
the  use  of  Psalms ;  the  ascriptions ;  the  acts  of  confession,  thanks- 
giving, adoration,  should  have  been  taught  us  by  nations  from 
which,  by  taste,  by  feelings,  by  political  institutions,  by  the  pro- 
gress of  civilization,  by  religious  antipathies,  we  are  divided  ? 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


287 


Think  only  of  our  northern  character,  our  cloudy  skies,  our  Teutonic 
independence,  our  vehement  nationality,  and  then  recollect  that  we 
are  using,  perhaps  every  day,  certainly  every  week  in  the  year,  at 
the  times  which  we  believe  to  be  most  solemn,  words  which  we 
owe  to  Hebrews  and  Greeks  and  Latins ;  and  that  in  these  words 
the  simple  folk  of  England,  in  spite  of  their  narrow  notions  and 
local  customs,  are  able  to  find  solace  and  delight. 

Now  if  the  meaning  of  Baptism  be  that  we  are  brought  into 
God's  family,  and  that  we  become  therefore  capable,  with  one 
mind  and  one  mouth,  of  glorifying  his  name;  if  the  creed  be  teach- 
ing us,  as  children  of  that  family,  severally  and  unitedly  to  ac- 
knowledge that  name,  and  how  it  is  related  to  us,  we  must  feel 
that  acts  of  worship  should  be,  of  all  acts,  those  which  most  belong 
to  our  position,  and  in  which  our  fellowship  is  most  entirely  real- 
ized. And  this  feeling  is  surely  one  which  must  be  wrought  out 
in  us  the  more  we  read  the  Bible  and  enter  into  the  sense  of  it. 
That  all  division  comes  through  idolatry ;  that  all  union  comes 
through  the  adoration  of  the  one  living  and  true  God  ;  these  are  the 
two  texts  of  the  Bible,  which,  from  the  record  of  the  dispersion  at 
Babel,  where  men  would  build  a  tower  whose  top  should  reach  to 
heaven,  for  the  worship  of  natural  things,  down  to  the  day  of 
Pentecost,  when  the  little  band  of  Apostles  in  the  temple  were 
heard  by  the  multitudes,  each  in  their  own  tongue,  magnifying 
God,  it  is  illustrating  and  inculcating.  If  any  thing  is  to  break 
down  the  barriers  of  space  and  time,  it  must  be  the  worship  of  Him 
who  is,  and  who  was,  and  who  is  to  come,  whom  the  heaven  of 
heavens  cannot  contain,  and  whose  dwelling  is  with  the  humble 
and  contrite  heart ;  if  any  thing  is  to  bring  those  at  one  whom 
these  accidents  of  our  mortality  are  separating,  this  must  be  the 
means.  That  men  have  turned  worship  to  precisely  the  opposite 
use ;  that  they  have  made  it  the  slave  of  their  circumstances,  the 
badge  of  their  divisions,  the  instrument  of  their  hatred,  I  have  con- 
fessed. The  question  is  whether  there  be  any  witness  in  the  world 
against  this  tendency ;  whether  God  has  given  us  any  sign  that 
these  separations  are  the  effects  of  our  choice,  not  of  his  will.  I 
say  that  these  forms  of  worship,  preserved  through  so  many  gen- 
erations, adapted  to  every  locality,  are  such  a  sign ;  I  say,  that  using 
these,  I  have  a  right  to  believe  that  the  blessings  of  the  day  of 


288 


SIGNS  OF  A 


Pentecost  have  been  given  once,  and  never  withdrawn ;  that  in 
the  deepest  and  most  practical  sense  there  is  a  community  which 
the  distinction  of  tongues  and  the  succession  of  ages  cannot 
break. 

Objections. — The  Quaker. 

Against  this  conclusion  the  Quaker  protests  vehemently. 
Forms  of  worship  are  not  only  no  signs  of  the  existence  of  a 
spiritual  commonwealth  ;  they  are  positively  incompatible  with 
it.  The  Spirit  bloweth  where  it  listeth.  Prayer  is  given  by  the 
Spirit.  By  these  prepared  forms  we  make  it  the  utterance  of  the 
will  and  reason  of  man. 

Nothing  can  be  truer  than  the  last  assertion.  We  do  make 
prayer  the  utterance  of  the  Will  and  Reason  of  man.  WTe  consider 
it  their  highest  and  most  perfect  utterance ;  that  in  which,  and 
in  which  alone,  they  fully  realize  themselves.  What  the  human 
Will  is  we  can  understand  from  no  terms  and  definitions  of  logic. 
They  can  only  express  one  half  of  its  meaning,  for  they  can  only 
describe  it  by  its  intrinsic  properties;  whereas  its  essential  char- 
acteristic is,  that  it  is  ever  going  out  of  itself.  They  can  only  de- 
scribe it  at  rest ;  whereas  it  only  is  while  it  acts.  But  in  prayer 
we  can  know  truly  and  safely  what  the  will  is;  prayer  expounds 
to  us  its  inmost  nature ;  prayer  substantiates  it,  and  proves  that  to 
be  the  greatest  reality  which  seems  in  language  to  be  the  greatest 
contradiction.  The  will  gives  itself  up  that  it  may  be  itself.  It 
dies  that  it  may  enjoy  life.  In  acknowledging  another  will  as  the 
only  will,  it  attains  its  own  freedom ;  even  as  in  trying  to  have  a 
being  of  its  own,  it  becomes  a  slave.  "  Father,  not  my  will,  but 
thine."  Where  do  we  behold  the  human  will  in  such  perfection, 
in  such  distinctness  of  life  and  power  as  in  these  awful  words  ? 
And  it  is  the  same  with  that  organ  which  beholds  as  with  that 
which  determines,  with  that  which  is  the  seat  of  wisdom  as  with 
that  which  is  the  source  of  action.  This  only  knows  itself  when  it 
forgets  itself ;  this  only  sees  while  the  sense  of  sight  is  lost  in  the 
object  of  it.  Accordingly  the  Reason  also  finds  its  deepest  mean- 
ing and  expression  in  worship. 

But  do  we  therefore  deny  that  the  Spirit  of  God  is  the  author 
of  prayer,  or,  in  Barclay's  words,  that  all  prayer  is  spurious  which 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


289 


does  not  proceed  from  Him  ?  No ;  but  in  affirming  the  one  pro- 
position we  affirm  the  other.  We  believe  that  the  Spirit  of  God  is 
the  awakener,  the  only  awakener,  of  the  spirit  of  man ;  that  the 
will  and  reason  not  called  forth  by  Him  must  remain  for  ever  the 
torpid,  helpless  victims  of  nature  and  sense.  We  believe  that  un- 
less the  Spirit  of  God  give  these  powers  their  direction,  they  will 
only  minister  to  that  which  they  are  meant  to  rule,  only  rivet  the 
bondage  which  it  is  their  privilege  to  break.  We  believe  that 
whoever  in  past  ages,  either  in  heathen  or  Jewish  lands,  used  them 
aright,  was  taught  and  enabled  so  to  use  them,  and  in  proportion  as 
he  used  them  aright,  confessed  the  inspiration.  We  believe  that 
it  is  our  privilege  to  exercise  them  as  they  could  not  be  exercised 
by  heathens,  or  even  by  Jews,  because  it  is  our  privilege  to  know 
that  there  is  a  living  Person  actuating  and  governing  them ;  and 
to  know  what  manner  of  person  He  is,  of  whom  He  is  the  Spirit, 
from  whom  He  proceeds,  with  whom  He  dwells.  We  believe 
that  this  knowledge  is  far  more  deep  and  awful  than  that  which 
any  one  possessed  who  merely  felt  that  he  was  the  subject  of  an 
inspiration ;  but  that  being  deep  and  awful,  it  is  incompatible  with 
excitement,  with  any  distortions  of  manner  or  of  voice,  with  the 
notion  that  we  are  merely  the  unconscious  animal  utterers  of  cer- 
tain sounds  which  are  imparted  to  us,  instead  of  the  living,  con- 
scious, voluntary,  rational  agents  of  One  who,  when  He  promised 
the  Spirit  to  his  disciples,  said,  "  Henceforth  I  call  you  not  serv- 
ants, but  I  have  called  you  friends,  for  the  servant  knoweth  not 
what  his  Lord  doeth  ;  but  whatsoever  I  have  heard  and  learned  of 
the  Father,  I  have  made  known  unto  you."  We  believe  that  we 
must  attribute  every  act  of  our  minds,  every  exercise  of  our  affec- 
tions, every  energy  of  our  will,  to  this  Spirit;  if  the  purpose  to 
which  we  direct  them  be  wrong,  still  the  gift  and  power  are  his, 
that  purpose  only  ours  ;  if  it  be  right,  we  shall  own  that  of  it  also 
He  i^  the  author.  We  believe  again  that  every  operation  in 
nature,  the  growth  of  every  tree,  the  budding  of  every  flower, 
should  be  referred  to  the  influence  of  Him  who  first  moved  the 
face  of  the  waters;  but  we  do  not  call  this  a  spiritual  influence, 
because,  though  wrought  by  a  Spiritual  Being,  it  is  wrought  upon 
unspiritual  subjects,  upon  things,  and  not  upon  persons. 

Such  are  some  of  the  inferences  which  follow  directly  from  the 


290 


SIGNS  OF  A 


idea  of  Baptism  as  a  new  birth,  and  of  the  Creed  as  the  proper  act 
of  the  newborn  creature.  That  which  is  born  of  the  Spirit,  is 
spirit,  and  seeks  its  spiritual  home  and  Father,  refers  all  its  acts 
and  movements  to  his  inspiration,  and  thereby  attains  its  own 
proper  distinctness  and  freedom.  That  which  is  born  of  the  flesh 
is  flesh,  and  seeks  the  earth  from  which  it  came,  acknowledging 
no  influence  and  attraction  but  that.  The  contradiction  of  hu- 
manity is  this — when  the  human  spirit  glorifies  itself;  and  as  the 
necessary  consequence  and  punishment  of  that  sin,  abdicates  its 
own  proper  rights  and  throne,  and  sinks  into  the  slave  of  the  flesh, 
impregnating  it  with  its  own  sin.  The  glory  of  humanity  is  this — 
when  the  human  spirit  renounces  itself,  and  as  its  reward  attains  a 
knowledge  of  Him  from  whom  it  came,  a  victory  over  the  flesh, 
and  the  power  of  communicating  to  it  its  own  life. 

The  objection,  then,  which  the  Quaker  makes  to  forms  of  prayer, 
that  they  proceed  from  man's  reason  and  will,  and  not  from  the 
Divine  Spirit,  is  one  which  involves  a  denial  of  the  very  nature 
and  possibility  of  prayer.  And  this  denial  has  been  of  the  most 
practical  kind.  He  acknowledges  prayer  to  be  a  necessary  act,  at 
once  the  sign  of  moral  health  and  the  instrument  in  producing  it. 
Yet  he  dares  not  pray  unless  he  have  a  sensible  impulse  urging  him 
to  the  exercise.  I  will  not  dwell  upon  the  Quaker  use  of  the  word 
"  sensible,"  though  it  seems  to  me  very  significant,  indicating  that 
those  who  most  abhor  all  appeals  to  the  senses  in  worship,  who 
think  that  the  sights  and  sounds  with  which  God  has  filled  the 
universe  cannot  be  redeemed  by  the  redeemed  spirit  to  his  service, 
do  yet  grossly  confound  impressions  on  the  spirit  with  impressions 
on  the  sense.  But  the  important  point  is  that  the  idea  of  our  life 
as  a  conflict,  an  idea  continually  present,  one  would  suppose,  to 
Fox's  mind,  is  thus  set  at  nought.  If  they  understood  that  the  true 
will  and  real  self  was  ever  at  war  with  the  mere  sensible  impulse, 
they  would  surely  have  believed  that  the  reluctance  of  the  natural 
man  to  an  act  which  we  know  to  be  good,  and  feel  to  be  necessary, 
is  one  of  the  best  proofs  that  it  is  prompted  and  encouraged  by  the 
Divine  Spirit.  But  the  truth  is,  that  the  idea  of  a  constant  living 
personal  presence  has  practically  deserted  those  who  seemed  atone 
time  to  make  this  belief  the  whole  of  their  religion  ;  that  the  notion 
of  an  influence,  an  inspiration,  visiting  certain  persons  at  certain 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


291 


seasons,  which  is  common  to  Christianity  with  Paganism,  is  nearly 
all  that  they  have  preserved.  Is  it  wonderful,  then,  that  they  should 
be  unable  to  understand  howT  the  Spirit  should  have  taught  men  in 
distant  generations  to  express  their  deepest  wants  in  the  same 
words,  or  how  through  these  words  they  should  enjoy  secret  and 
awful  communion  with  each  other,  and  with  the  Most  High  ?  But, 
if  so,  what  better  proof  do  I  want  that  these  forms  are  one  of  the 
clear  and  indispensable  signs  of  a  spiritual  and  univeral  fellowship  ? 

The  Pure  Protestant. 

The  pure  Protestants  who  have  rejected  the  use  of  Li  turgies 
sympathize  but  little  in  the  Quaker's  objections  to  them.  They 
have  no  disposition  to  deny  the  voluntary  nature  of  prayer  or  of 
any  religious  act.  Because  it  has  this  character,  they  say  forms 
are  an  intolerable  bondage.  '  Each  man  should  be  able  to  express 
his  own  wants  in  his  own  way.  In  his  chamber  each  man  does  or 
should  lay  bare  his  own  feelings  and  wishes  before  God.  This  is 
the  proper  rule  and  standard  of  prayer,  according  to  our  Lord's 
words :  "  When  thou  prayest,  enter  into  thy  closset."  But  since 
the  minister,  who  is  or  should  be  chosen  by  the  congregation,  has 
a  knowledge  of  the  different  circumstances  of  its  members,  and  is 
looked  up  to  by  them  as  a  person  fit  to  preach  the  Gospel  of  Christ 
to  them,  it  is  very  right  that  he  should  offer  up  prayers  for  himself 
and  them,  suggested  by  the  feelings  of  the  moment,  probably  a 
preparation  for  the  sermon  he  is  about  to  deliver,  and  therefore  full 
of  earnestness  and  unction.  Forms  of  prayer  are  manifestly  un- 
suitable for  both  these  purposes;  they  cannot  be  adapted  to  changes 
of  circumstances ;  they  cannot  be  connected  with  the  feelings  either 
of  the  pastor  or  of  the  people;  they  are  the  impositions  of  another 
age,  affronting  to  the  understanding  and  painful  to  the  conscience 
of  those  who  use  them.' 

Prayer  to  God  is  assumed  in  this  statement  to  be,  according  to 
the  primary  notion  of  it,  individual.  A  particular  man  wants  to 
obtain  certain  blessings ;  he  therefore  asks  them  of  Him  who  he 
believes  can  bestow  them.  To  many  persons  this  proposition  seems 
self-evident;  whoever  doubts  it  is  an  enemy  of  common  sense. 
Nevertheless  it  is,  I  believe,  at  war  with  the  experience  of  every 
religious  man.    He  learns  very  soon  that  passionate  eagerness  to 


292 


SIGNS  OF  A 


get  some  good  thing  for  himself — be  it  fine  weather  for  the  sake  of 
his  crops,  or  the  salvation  of  his  soul — is  not  a  help  to  pray,  but 
the  greatest  possible  hinderance  to  it.  Explain  the  fact  as  you  will, 
but  a  fact  it  is,  confessed  by  persons  of  different  sentiments  in  dif- 
ferent forms  of  language,  continually  presenting  itself  afresh  to  those 
who  visit  dying  beds.  The  selfish  object  which  we  seek  floats 
before  our  minds — if  it  be  an  earthly  object,  palpably  ;  if  an  invisi- 
ble unknown  object,  in  hazy  images,  having  more  in  them  of  terror 
than  of  beauty — but  the  object,  He  to  whom  our  prayer  is  address- 
ed, is  afar  off ;  of  Him  there  is  scarcely  the  least  discernment. 
He  is  regarded  as  a  Being  who  can  inflict  evil  and  may  choose 
to  confer  a  blessing ;  or  if  through  the  teachings  of  our  childhood 
we  have  some  better  knowledge,  the  consciousness  of  self-seeking 
pervents  it,  and  we  rise  up  feeling  that  the  sacrifice  is  not  accepted ; 
"  we  are  very  wroth,  and  our  countenance  falls."  And  how  is  it 
that  this  kind  of  prayer,  so  natural  to  every  man,  is  changed  for 
any  other  ?  "  When  thou  enterest  into  thy  closet,"  these  are  the 
words  of  our  Lord  to  which  the  pure  Protestant  appeals,  say,  "  Our 
Father  which  art  in  heaven  ;  Hallowed  be  thy  name."  Oh  won- 
derful teaching!  not  how  the  selfishness  of  the  closet  may  be  car- 
ried into  the  temple,  but  how  the  breadth  and  universality  of  spirit 
which  belong  to  the  temple  may  be  attained  in  the  closet. 

When  thou  art  most  alone  thou  must  still,  if  thou  wouldest  pray, 
be  in  the  midst  of  a  family  j  thou  must  call  upon  a  Father;  thou 
must  not  dare  to  say  my,  but  our.  Dost  thou  desire  to  be  very 
holy  1  Yet  this  must  not  be  thy  petition  ;  thou  must  say, "  Hal- 
lowed be  thy  name."  Dost  thou  wish  for  some  assurance  of  a 
heaven  for  thyself?  Yet  this  must  be  thy  language:  "  Thy  king- 
dom come."  Dost  thou  wish  to  get  some  favourite  project  accom- 
plished ?  it  must  be  sought  in  this  manner :  "  Thy  will  be  done  on 
earth  as  it  is  in  heaven."  Dost  thou  want  a  supply  of  thy  necessities, 
bodily  or  spiritual  ?  Then  thou  must  desire  the  same  for  all  thy 
brethren,  as  well  as  for  thyself :  "  Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread." 
Dost  thou  want  forgiveness  for  thy  individual  sins  1  The  prayer 
is  still,  "  Forgive  us  our  trespasses,"  and  the  gift  is  only  received 
when  it  is  circulated, "  as  we  forgive  them  that  trespass  against  us." 
Do  you  feel  that  your  fellow-creatures  are  your  tempters  ?  Yet  you 
must  acknowledge  their  temptations  and  yours  to  be  the  same  ;  you 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


293 


must  ask  that  they  may  not  be  led  into  the  very  temptations  which 
they  cause,  else  you  will  be  their  tempter  as  well  as  your  own. 
And  this  because  the  evil  from  which  you  must  pray  to  be  delivered 
is  a  common  evil,  an  evil  which  is  the  same  in  root  and  principle, 
though  it  may  take  innumerable  forms  ;  that  very  evil  of  selfishness, 
of  individuality,  which  we  are  disposed  to  make  our  very  prayers  a 
means  of  seeking,  and  which  will  encompass  us  and  and  possess 
us,  if  we  do  not  learn  to  join  in  the  ascription  :  "  Thine  is  the 
kingdom  and  the  power  and  the  glory." 

I  do  not  mean  that  many  objectors  to  forms  may  not  have  pre- 
served these  truths,  and  with  heart  and  soul  entered  into  them  ;  but 
I  must  maintain,  that  just  so  far  as  they  have  done  so,  the  reason 
of  their  complaint  ceases.  If  the  individual  prayer  is  not  the 
highest  and  most  essential  prayer,  but  rather  is  no  prayer  at  all,  then 
the  prayer  of  the  congregation  is  not  an  aggregate  of  such  indivi- 
dual prayers,  but  the  prayer  of  a  body,  each  member  of  which  pro- 
fesses to  have  renounced  his  own,  selfish  position,  that  he  may 
come  as  one  of  a  family  to  seek  the  Father  of  it. 

In  what  sense,  then,  can  extempore  utterances  be  said  to  be 
most  declaratory  of  our  wants  ?  Of  wrhat  wants  ?  Do  the  mem- 
bers of  the  congregation  feel  that  they  have  sinned,  and  do  they 
wish  to  confess  their  sins  ?  Is  this  a  local  feeling,  a  feeling  be- 
longing to  one  set  of  circumstances,  or  to  one  period  of  time  ?  Or 
is  it  a  human  feeling,  belonging  to  men  as  men  ?  '  But  each  man 
has  his  own  particular  sin  ;  his  own  burden,  of  which  he  himself  is 
conscious.'  Undoubtedly  ;  and  is  not  his  sin  and  burden  just  this, 
that  he  has  chosen  a  scheme  of  his  own,  that  he  has  followed  cer- 
tain tastes  and  inclinations  of  his  own,  and  so  that  he  has  forgotten 
his  Father  in  heaven  and  his  brethren  on  earth  ?  Does  not  each 
particular  sin  spring  from  this  root  ?  And  is  it  not  this  which  inter- 
prets that  sense  of  the  individual  character  of  sin,  and  the  personal 
responsibility  for  it,  upon  which  so  much  stress  is,  so  rightly,  laid  ? 
The  load  lies  on  the  separate  conscience  of  each  man.  It  is  the 
very  nature  and  law  of  the  conscience  that  it  singles  out  each  man, 
severs  him  from  his  fellow,  makes  him  feel  that  the  participation 
of  the  whole  universe  in  his  guilt  does  not  make  it  less  to  him. 
But  then  the  conscience  reproves  us  for  this  very  thing ;  for  having 
chosen  to  be  divided  when  we  were  meant  to  be  one.    And  since 


294 


SIGNS  OF  A 


it  has  reproved  men  for  this  sin  ever  since  Adam's  fall,  and  since 
it  has  taught  every  Christian  man  that  this  was  emphatically  and 
most  awfully  his  sin — ever  since  Christ  died  that  we  might  be  all 
one,  as  He  is  with  the  Father — there  seems  no  reason  why  the  lan- 
guage of  one  generation,  in  confessing  this  sin,  should  not  be  the 
language  of  all.  No  reason  why  it  should  not  be ;  the  greatest 
blessing,  if  by  any  means  it  could  be ;  since  by  this  means  the 
sense  of  sonship  and  brotherhood  would  be  realized  and  revived  in 
the  very  act  of  acknowledging  disobedience  and  selfishness. 

Or  does  some  member  of  the  congregation  desire  to  give  thanks 
for  a  blessing  which  has  been  vouchsafed  to  him  particularly — 
must  this  be  a  local  temporary  feeling,  because  it  is  called  forth  by 
a  local  temporary  occasion  i  Does  it  not  cease  to  be  a  true  feel- 
ing if  it  is  ?  If  from  the  particular  blessing  the  heart  do  not  gain 
enlargement,  be  not  drawn  out  into  a  contemplation  of  other  bless- 
ings ;  if  it  be  not  led  to  dwell  most  upon  those  which  are  com- 
mon and  permanent,  as  being  the  greatest,  though  perhaps  only  ob- 
served when  they  are  taken  away,  or  when  some  startling  novelty 
brings  them  into  notice,  the  purpose  of  God  in  bestowing  that 
good  thing  is  surely  not  accomplished  ;  the  man  has  not  really 
profited  by  it.  But  if  he  have,  his  feelings  become  human  feel- 
ings; they  do  not  want  a  specific,  self-chosen  mode  of  expression; 
he  can  find  them  in  the  Psalms  of  David  ;  he  can  utter  them  in 
the  language  of  Christian  men  who  lived  in  other  climes  and  pe- 
riods. He  can  give  thanks  for  creation,  preservation,  redemption  ; 
for  gifts  enabling  him  to  enjoy  this  life  and  another,  which  are  be- 
stowed upon  his  race  as  wTell  as  himself ;  he  can  ask  that  they  as 
well  as  he  may  have,  above  all  other  good  things,  that  of  a  thank- 
ful spirit ;  his  own  special  mercies  will  then  be  understood  and  ap- 
preciated. 

Or  does  a  particular  member  of  the  congregation  long  for 
some  means,  noJ:  of  declaring  his  own  sins,  or  his  own  thankful- 
ness, but  of  praising  the  name  of  God,  of  glorifying  Him  for  his 
great  glory  ?  Is  this  a  specific,  local,  temporary,  individual  emo- 
tion ?  Can  it  have  a  specific,  local,  temporary,  individual  expres- 
sion ?  Is  it  too  humiliating,  too  limiting  to  the  largeness  of  a 
modern  intellect,  that  it  should  use  the  words  of  other  days,  and 
say, "  We  praise  thee,  0  God ;  we  acknowledge  thee  to  be  the 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


295 


Lord  !"  or,  "  Glory  be  to  the  Father,  and  to  the  Son,  and  to  the 
Holy  Ghost :  As  it  was  in  the  beginning,  is  now,  and  ever  shall 
be,  world  without  end." 

Or,  lastly,  does  the  same  particular  member  of  the  congregation 
feel  his  need  of  mercies  spiritual  and  temporal,  and  desire  to  ask 
for  them?  We  have  seen  by  the  Lord's  prayer  how  he  ought  to 
ask  them,  if  he  be  alone  in  his  chamber ;  how  necessary  it  is  that 
he  should  not  look  for  them  as  meant  for  him,  otherwise  than  as 
the  child  of  a  father,  as  one  of  many  brethren.  Are  they  tempo- 
ral, the  blessings  of  food  and  raiment  ?  Does  he  dare  to  seek  for 
these  with  a  desire  to  appropriate  them  exclusively  1  Then  his 
prayer  becomes  a  sin.  Are  they  spiritual  ?  Then  the  blessing 
itself  is  that  of  more  intimate  communion  with  his  Father,  a  larger 
communion  with  the  family.  Is  it  necessary  that  he  should  limit 
these  by  the  particular  notions  and  phrases  of  his  own  time  ?  Is  it 
a  great  hardship  and  bondage  to  be  obliged  to  use  a  more  general, 
and  therefore,  one  would  fancy,  a  more  becoming  language  ? 

If  it  be  said,  *  Every  prayer  must  be  composed  in  some  age, 
why  do  you  suppose  that  those  which  have  come  down  from  an- 
other time  must  possess  those  qualities  which  you  attribute  to  prayer 
more  than  those  which  are  composed  in  our  own  V  I  answer,  I 
do  not  say  that  they  must  be  better,  or  why  they  must  be  better, 
I  have  merely  been  contending  with  those  who  say,  that  because 
they  come  down  to  us  from  another  time,  they  cannot  be  fit  for  our 
use.  I  do  believe,  however,  that  the  prayers  written  in  the  first 
ages  of  Christianity  are  in  general  more  free,  more  reverent,  more 
universal,  than  those  which  have  been  poured  forth  since.  I  do  not 
think  the  opinion  is  a  singular  one;  and  I  would  rather  its  sound- 
ness were  tried  by  the  feelings  and  sympathies  of  religious  men  in 
different  periods  and  circumstances,  but  especially  of  men  in  times 
of  great  suffering,  than  by  any  theories  or  arguments  of  mine. 
Still  I  do  not  find  it  harder  to  explain  to  myself  why  this  should 
be  so,  than  why  there  should  be  a  fresher,  truer  feeling  respecting 
nature  and  the  outward  transactions  of  men  in  Homer,  than  in  the 
poetry  of  the  seventeenth  or  eighteenth  centuries.  If  there  were 
that  feeling  respecting  God,  as  the  source  of  all  things  and  the 
end  of  all  things,  which  I  attributed  in  the  last  section  to  the  age 
of  the  Fathers,  it  cannot  be  strange,  I  think,  that  their  devotional 


296 


SIGNS  OF  A 


outpourings  should  have  been  simpler,  purer,  more  human,  than 
those  of  men  who  were  occupied,  and,  as  I  conceive,  were  by  the 
order  of  Providence  meant  to  be  occupied  in  subtle  questions  re- 
specting the  operations  of  their  own  minds,  or  with  inquiries  into 
the  law  and  course  of  nature.  Whether  the  succession  and  order 
of  devotional  acts  may  not  have  much  to  do  with  the  history  and 
circumstances  of  man,  as  well  as  with  the  nature  and  plans  of  God  ; 
and  whether,  therefore,  other  ages  may  not  have  thrown  a  light 
upon  this  subject,  which  the  first  did  not  possess,  I  will  not  say. 
To  those  who  deny  all  order  in  devotion,  who  think  it  little  less 
than  a  sin  that  offices  of  confession  should  be  laid  down  as  prepar- 
atory to  offices  of  thanksgiving,  these  again  to  offices  of  prayer,  and 
these  to  the  higher  communion,  it  can  seem  no  great  derogation 
from  the  honour  of  the  primitive  times,  if  we  should  admit  that  the 
apprehension  of  this  spiritual  sequence  may  only  in  part  have  be- 
longed to  them.  And  if  such  persons  still  require  a  further  reason 
why  we  think  that  the  particular  acts  of  praise  and  prayer  were 
more  congenial  to  older  times  than  to  modern,  the  considerations 
which  have  been  occupying  us  under  this  head  involve  the  reply. 
There  has  been  a  constant  tendency  for  several  centuries  towards 
greater  individuality  of  thought  and  feeling.  There  is  a  true 
ground  for  this  tendency,  though  it  may  have  led  to  the  most  false 
results.  But  it  is  in  itself,  w7hen  unsustained  by  another  tendency, 
unfavorable  to  the  worship  of  God,  as  well  as  to  fellowship  among 
men.  A  vehement  reaction  against  this  tendency  has  begun  in  all 
parts  of  Europe.  One  of  the  fruits  of  it  will  certainly  be  an  aver- 
sion from  all  those  utterances  which  modern  Protestants  have  dig- 
nified with  the  name  of  devotion ;  if  another  consequence  of  it  be 
not  a  return  to  the  old  forms  and  a  delight  in  them,  we  must  ex- 
pect a  reign  of  atheism. 

The  Philosopher. 

When  the  modern  philosopher  makes  any  objections  to  forms 
of  worship,  it  is  chiefly  because  they  substantiate  and  perpetuate 
two  mischievous  superstitions.  One  is  that  a  Being,  who  by  his 
idea  and  law  is  unchangeable  and  perfect,  can  be  swayed  or  led 
into  better  acts  and  purposes  than  his  own  by  our  petitions ;  the 
other  is  that  it  can  please  Him  to  receive  the  praises  or  commen- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


297 


dations  of  his  creatures.  These  complaints  are  usually  put  forth 
with  most  breadth  and  precision  by  disciples  of  the  Utilitarian 
school.  But  it  is  evident  that  they  are  practically  adopted,  though 
with  some  varieties  of  expression,  and  in  connexion  with  a  different 
anthropological  theory,  by  a  large  section  of  Rationalists. 

Now  in  one  phrase  or  another  both  these  parties  acknowledge, 
by  every  word  which  they  speak,  and  every  act  which  they  do, 
either  as  philosophers  or  as  ordinary  men,  that  evil  exists,  and  that 
it  ought  to  be  and  may  be  by  some  means  diminished.  Tne  Utili- 
tarian traces  it  all  to  bad  systems  of  government ;  the  Rationalist 
refers  it  directly  to  man's  ignorance  of  himself  and  his  own  pow- 
ers. Each  looks  forward  to  his  own  Avatar,  and  to  a  millennial 
period  of  the  species  which  shall  follow.  Each  then  does  acknow- 
ledge an  Ideal,  with  which  men  should  be  in  agreement,  with 
which  they  are  not  in  agreement,  into  agreement  with  which  they 
may  by  some  process  be  brought.  Wherein,  then,  do  we  and  they 
differ  ?  Not  in  the  acknowledgment  of  actual  inconsistency  and 
contradiction  :  this  has  nothing  to  do  with  either  of  us ;  we  simply 
own  what  we  cannot  deny.  But  in  this,  that  our  Ideal  is  a  living 
Be^ng ;  that  we  believe  Him  to  have  given  all  things  their  right 
type  and  order  ;  that  we  believe  them  when  in  their  relation  to 
Him  to  be  still  very  good;  that  we  believe  their  disturbance  and 
incoherency  to  be  the  result  of  a  voluntary  renunciation  of  alle- 
giance to  Him,  by  the  only  creature  which  could  commit  such  an 
act ;  that  we  believe  all  disturbance  and  incoherency  to  be  con- 
trary to  his  will ;  that  we  believe  the  restoration  to  begin  in  the 
submission  of  those  who  have  brought  about  the  confusion.  The 
submission  consists  in  the  confession  that  his  will  is  the  good  will ; 
one  of  the  main  acts  and  exercises  of  it  is  that  of  entering  into  his 
will,  and  beseeching  that  it  may  be  put  forth  for  the  removal  of 
those  curses  whereof  the  evil  will  has  been  the  cause.  This  is  the 
rationale — in  cold  and  miserable  words — of  those  ancient  litanies 
which  express  to  this  day  the  thoughts  and  longings  of  the  most 
earnest  people  in  different  corners  of  the  earth.  They  are  not 
founded  on  the  notion  that  any  thing  is  mutable  in  God.  They 
are  cries  for  the  vindication  and  preservation  of  his  immutable 
order.  They  are  confessions  that  every  act  of  his  providence,  from 
the  first  hour  of  the  world,  has  had  for  its  end  the  making  this  im- 


298 


SIGNS  OF  A 


mutable  order  manifest,  and  the  bringing  the  universe  into  con- 
formity with  it.  But  they  are  not  founded  upon  the  lying  fancy 
that  the  world  is  right ;  that  persons  are  fulfilling  their  proper  re- 
lations to  each  other ;  that  things  are  not  discomposed  and  made 
evil  by  the  sin  of  those  who  are  meant  to  direct  them.  Man,  they 
assume,  is  God's  minister,  acting  for  Him,  able  to  perform  his  in- 
tentions towards  his  involuntary  creatures ;  able,  because  he  has  a 
will,  to  set  them  at  nought.  His  proper  condition,  in  whatever 
place  he  were,  would  be  that  of  dependence,  of  doing  the  will  of 
another.  His  proper  way  of  fulfilling  that  condition  here,  is  by 
crying  out  for  the  rectification  of  that  which  is  independent,  which 
has  lost  its  centre,  which  is  struggling  to  stand  by  itself,  and  which 
therefore  cannot  stand  at  all ;  for  the  rectification  of  this,  and  there- 
fore of  whatever  else  has  through  this  cause  suffered  decay  and 
ruin. 

But  if  it  be  said,  "  This  supposes  that  a  restoration  has  taken 
place  already.  These  prayers  are  unmeaning,  unless  those  who 
offer  them  believe  themselves,  on  some  pretext  or  other,  to  be  in  a 
better  condition  than  those  about  whom  they  pray — "  I  an- 
swer, "  Unquestionably ;  it  is  the  very  point  which  I  have  been 
pressing,  that  prayer  does  suppose  a  restoration  ;  that  the  idea  of 
prayer  and  the  idea  of  a  Church  can  never  be  separated,  each  im- 
plying the  other;  and  that  a  Church  which  is  not  built  upon  the 
confession  of  a  restored  humanity  is  a  contradiction  in  terms."  But, 
observe,  a  restored  humanity  ;  and  therefore  those  who  offer  their 
prayers  do  not  put  forth  any  claim  of  superiority  to  their  race — 
nay,  not  to  the  worst  member  of  their  race.  The  very  essence  of 
their  prayers  is  this :  a  cry  that  those  sins  which  they  feel  in  them- 
selves, under  which  they  are  groaning,  which  they  have  commit- 
ted, may  not  be,  as  they  have  been,  their  masters,  and  the  masters 
of  the  universe.  They  who  pray  do  not  feel  this  less  than  other 
men  but  more ;  they  do  not  reject  evils  from  themselves,  to  cast 
them  upon  their  neighbours  more  than  other  men  do  ;  on  the  con- 
trary, they  identifyt  heir  neighbours'  sins  with  their  own  ;  they  feel 
that  they  have  them,  and  are  responsible  for  them.  Only  as  mem- 
bers of  a  redeemed  race  and  family  they  can  vindicate  the  privi- 
lege, which  has  been  asserted  for  them,  of  being  new  creatures,  of 
casting  off  the  slough  of  their  selfish  natures,  of  disclaiming  that 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


299 


misery  which  by  their  rebellion  they  have  made  their  own,  of  en- 
tering into  that  blessedness  which  their  Master  by  his  obedience 
has  obtained  for  all  who  will  have  their  portion  in  Him.  So  that 
the  Philosopher  says  well  and  truly,  that  this  superstition  of  pray- 
er, if  it  be  one,  has  been  maintained  by  forms,  and  without  forms 
would  be  likely  to  die  out.  Not  as  if  the  sense  and  necessity  of 
prayer  could  ever  die  out  in  man,  but  because  the  only  condition 
under  which  it  can  be  a  true  and  reasonable  service,  that  of  its 
being  presented  by  men,  as  members  of  a  body  or  family,  which 
continues  the  same  from  generation  to  generation,  and  which  con- 
verts the  notion  of  a  human  race  from  a  dream  into  a  reality,  is  in 
these  forms  embodied,  and  wheresoever  they  are  neglected  is  nearly 
lost. 

I  have  still  to  speak  on  the  subject  of  praise,  which  seems  to 
the  Philosopher  a  thing  so  unworthy  of  men  to  offer  or  of  God  to 
receive.  The  ground  of  this  conclusion  is  that  the  words  praise 
and  flattery  are  convertible ;  and  that  since  flattery  is  offensive  to 
an  imperfect  being,  so  far  as  he  has  right  feelings,  and  is  only  so 
far  tolerable  as  he  is  weak  and  vain,  it  must  to  a  perfect  Being,  if 
He  took  cognizance  of  such  folly,  be  altogether  odious.  Now  I 
join  issue  with  them  upon  all  these  points.  Suppose  praise  to  be 
offered  to  a  fellow  man  which  he  does  not  deserve,  it  is  abominable 
because  it  is  false ;  suppose  that,  being  deserved,  it  is  offered  to 
him  with  the  view  of  bribing  him  to  bestow  future  favours,  it  is  of- 
fensive, because  it  is  mean  ;  suppose  him  to  deserve  it,  and  that  it 
is  offered  with  no  unworthy  motive,  it  may  be  wrong,  because  it 
is  imprudent ;  for  men,  through  their  imperfections,  are  made  vain, 
by  hearing  themselves  even  rightly  commended.  But  if  we  could 
suppose  these  circumstances  absent,  I  confidently  affirm,  that  there 
is  not  any  occupation  so  elevating  and  delightful  to  a  man,  as  that 
of  praising  and  thanking  his  brethren.  Generous  men,  in  all  ages 
and  nations,  have  felt  it  so ;  and  when  the  motives  of  self-interest 
have  been  farthest  from  them,  even  respect  for  the  object  of  their 
admiration,  and  fear  of  doing  him  hurt,  have  not  availed  to  restrain 
them  from  expressing  their  sense  of  the  favours  which  he  has  be- 
stowed on  them,  or  their  delight  in  the  beauty  and  harmony  of  his 
character.  With  no  ignoble  aim,  these  outpourings  of  the  heart 
have  often  been  directed  to  kings  and  great  men ;  because  the 


300 


SIGNS  OF  A 


thankful  and  humble  heart  has  felt  their  acts  as  a  condescension, 
and  has  perceived  a  kind  of  special  propriety  and  suitableness  in 
their  virtues.  But  they  have  been  directed  also  to  suffering  friends, 
and  poor  scholars,  and  persecuted  saints,  and  especially  to  the  dead, 
from  whom  nothing  could  ever  be  expected,  and  to  whom  they 
could  not  be  dangerous.  Wherefore,  the  true  and  obvious  analogy 
from  human  experience  is, — that  if  God  have  none  of  the  imper- 
fection which  could  make  Him  obnoxious  to  the  mischievousness  of 
praise;  and  if  there  have  proceeded  from  Him  all  the  benefits 
which  all  his  creatures  have  received ;  and  if  there  be  in  Him  all 
the  goodness  and  truth,  of  which  the  goodness  and  truth  in  man 
are  the  reflection, — there  can  be  no  act  so  entirely  suit-able  to  man, 
so  thoroughly  joyful,  as  that  of  thanking  and  blessing  Him.  In 
which  act,  if  any  one  discovers  a  low  and  cringing  desire  to  win 
some  good  from  the  Being  thus  magnified,  let  him  know  that, 
whoever  enters  upon  the  work  in  this  spirit,  and  with  this  object, 
will  be  soon  so  struck  with  its  utter  ridiculousness  and  incongruity, 
or  else  so  wearied  with  the  heartless  and  hypocritical  effort,  that 
no  pains  he  can  use  will  enable  him  to  persevere  in  it;  or,  at  any 
rate,  to  persuade  himself  that  he  is  doing  more  than  repeating  a 
set  of  incoherent,  unintelligible  sounds.  In  the  loss  of  self,  in  the 
escape  from  self,  consists  the  freedom  and  enjoyment  of  that  act. 
The  worshipper  has  found  that  object  to  which  the  eyes  of  himself 
and  of  all  creatures  were  meant  to  be  directed,  in  beholding  which 
they  attain  the  perfection  of  their  being,  while  they  lose  all  the 
feeling  of  selfish  appropriation  which  is  incompatible  with  perfection. 
They  gaze  upon  Him  who  is  the  all-embracing  Love,  with  whom 
no  selfishness  can  dwell,  the  all-clear  and  distinguishing  truth,  from 
which  darkness  and  falsehood  flee  away  ;  and  they  are  changed 
into  the  same  image,  and  their  praises  are  only  the  responses  to  the 
joy  with  which  He  looks  upon  his  redeemed  creation  and  declares 
it  very  good. 

Let  this  service  seem  foolish  to  whom  it  will,  we  know  not  only 
that  it  must  be  acceptable  to  God,  because  He  is  a  spirit,  and  be- 
cause He  is  truth,  and  because  He  seeketh  them  to  worship  who 
will  worship  Him  in  spirit  and  truth,  but  we  know  also  that  it  meets 
all  the  deepest  wants  which  men,  in  the  student's  garret,  in  the  palace 
and  the  hut,  have  been  all,  by  different  methods,  trying  to  express. 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  301 

The  man  of  earnest  meditation,  hating  the  world's  turmoil, 
angry  at  its  meanness,  yet  amidst  many  thoughts  of  pride  and  dis- 
content retaining  a  desire  for  its  good,  learns  that  to  seek  truth  is 
the  proper  end  of  his  life, — to  find  it  his  only  felicity ;  and  he 
strives,  and  toils,  and  suffers,  and  if  perchance  the  vision  of  some 
principle  of  living  power  dawns  upon  him,  he  shouts  tvQrjxa  through 
the  universe.  His  joy  is  true  joy  ;  yet  when  he  thinks  of  the  thou- 
sands of  living  creatures,  men  like  himself,  to  whom  his  discovery 
will  do  no  good,  who  must  groan  and  die  still,  his  labour  seems  all 
vanity,  his  truth  a  dream,  and  he  curses  himself  for  having  dared 
to  dwell  so  apart  from  human  sympathies.  The  gentle  and  gene- 
rous man,  nursed  amid  kindly  and  family  influences,  his  imagina- 
tion early  trained  to  converse  with  lovely  objects,  his  heart  and 
conscience  not  seared,  sees  a  beauty  living  and  moving  through  all 
things,  and  pursues  it  with  an  insatiable  passion.  He  cannot  doubt 
the  reality  of  his  faith,  though  men  call  it  a  delusion;  that  which 
has  so  possessed  his  being  and  exalted  it,  cannot  be  a  lie.  But 
what  mean  pain,  and  confusion,  and  death  ?  Are  they  merely 
shadows  to  make  the  light  shine  brighter? — No  !  they  master  it, — 
they  obscure  it.  He  becomes  saddened ;  the  glory  has  fled  from 
the  earth,  and  he  sees  not  how  it  can  ever  return  again.  Thus  in 
their  solitary  hours  have  men,  according  to  their  different  tendencies 
and  education,  been  haunted  by  the  vision  of  a  truth  for  which  it 
were  worth  while  to  die,  and  of  a  loveliness  which  must  be  the 
sole  charm  of  life ;  and  the  one  has  seemed  to  dwell  only  in  cold 
words  and  propositions,  and  the  other  to  be  ever  changing  its 
shapes,  and  vanishing  at  last  altogether. 

Meantime  the  business  of  the  world  has  not  been  intermitted ; 
kings  have  been  reigning  and  dynasties  changing;  and  men  have 
felt  that  unless  there  were  some  awful  Law  which  those  kino-s 
acknowledged,  and  which  lasts  amidst  all  those  changes  of  dynasty, 
society  was  a  mere  dream  and  impossibility.  Philosophers  have 
felt  that  such  a  Law  must  be ;  politicians  that  they  must  create 
the  impression  of  it.  But  what  is  this  Law  ?  There  are  times 
when  you  cannot  put  aside  this  question, — when  it  is  asked,  and 
must  be  answered;  for  men  rise  up  and  say,  that  it  is  but  a  cobweb 
imagination  which  has  been  cut  through  by  swords  in  former  days, 
and  which  they  with  their  brushes  can  now  sweep  away  entirely. 

20 


302 


SIGNS  OF  A 


Where  is  its  birth-place  and  its  home, — the  warrant  of  its  autho- 
rity, the  guardian  of  its  permanence  ? 

Yet  supposing  this  question  too  were  answered,  there  is  a  uni- 
verse of  distinct  living  beings  groaning  for  a  daily  subsistence. 
What  shall  we  say  of  these  ?  "  Try  and  make  them  philosophers," 
cries  one ;  "  teach  them  to  understand  the  truth  of  things ;  teach 
them  to  see  the  fair  proportions  of  things."  Well !  this  is  plausi- 
ble,— let  us  begin.  "  But  no,"  says  another,  who  seems  to  be  wise, 
"  this  will  never  avail.  Wliat  will  your  people  care  about  the  sun 
and  stars  ?  They  are  men ;  they  feel  that  other  men  have  ruled 
them,  and  not  for  their  benefit ;  they  want  to  rule  themselves. 
Give  them  some  share  in  the  state;  then  it  will  be  time  to  think  of 
making  them  natural  philosophers."  WTe  are  convinced  by  the 
wisdom  of  these  remarks;  we  see  that  men  cannot  be  satisfied 
with  merely  contemplating  things  at  a  distance;  they  must  feel 
that  they  belong  to  a  system ;  they  must  feel  that  it  does  not  move 
without  them.  And  though  we  do  not  like  to  give  up  the  hope  of 
seeing  our  brethren  better  acquainted  even  with  the  wonders  of  the 
world  about  them,  we  acknowledge  that  the  world  in  which  they 
are  actually  to  live  and  move,  must  be  one  of  human  feelings  and 
hopes.  But  when  we  ask  you  where  and  how  you  are  making  the 
experiment  for  raising  the  poor  man  to  a  feeling  of  his  position, 
for  giving  him  citizenship  and  political  power,  we  are  bound  to 
confess  that  we  can  see  nothing  but  a  scheme  to  rob  the  poor  man 
of  that  which  he  has  already,  to  take  from  him  all  sense  of  dignity 
and  freedom,  and  equality,  and  reduce  him  into  a  condition  of  hope- 
less slavery. 

Now  supposing  it  were  possible  that  truth  and  goodness  are 
not  abstractions,  are  not  formulas,  but  are  realities ;  and  as  the 
traces  of  them  have  been  seen  in  the  acts  of  persons,  so  that  they 
dwell  absolutely  in  a  Person;  supposing  it  were  true  that  this 
Being  is  the  King  of  kings  and  Lord  of  lords,  from  whom  all  law7 
derives  its  life  and  potency ;  supposing  this  Being  has  established 
for  Himself  a  witness  in  the  heart  of  the  poorest  man  in  this  world, 
and  has  decreed  that  there  should  be  desires  in  that  heart  which 
any  thing  short  of  his  own  infinite  perfection  shall  not  satisfy ;  and 
has  called  this  poor  man  to  be  a  citizen  of  his  kingdom,  yea,  a 
member  incorporate  thereof,  and  has  said  that  he,  as  much  as  the 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


303 


richest  man,  is  concerned  in  the  order  and  organization  of  this 
kingdom,  and  may  urge  on  the  wheels  in  the  midst  of  which  the 
spirit  of  the  living  creature  is  moving ;  would  it  not  then  be  true 
that  the  cravings  of  the  philosopher,  the  necessities  of  the  states- 
man, the  hopes  of  the  wayfarer,  have  all  their  highest  interpreta- 
tion in  this  worship  wThich  is  said  to  be  the  idlest  of  all  ceremonies  ? 
Are  not  the  recorded  deeds  and  desires  of  the  world  utterly  unin- 
telligible without  it  ?  If  this  ceremony  were  abolished — if  the 
idea  of  a  perfect  Being  united  to  man,  inspiring  him  with  prayer, 
and  hearing  his  prayers,  were  lost  out  of  the  universe, — would  not 
the  imperfect  hope  of  the  philosopher  die  too  ?  would  not  the  be- 
lief in  Law  become  impossible  ?  would  not  each  man  sink  further 
and  further  into  solitude  and  brutality,  finding  none  able  to  raise 
him,  none  who  was  not  assisting  to  deepen  his  degradation  ? 

THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 

But  still  these  old  Liturgies  are  in  some  sense  Popish.  The 
prayers  in  them  have  reached  any  modern  nations  wThich  may 
have  adopted  them  through  Popish  hands ;  they  have  received  a 
Popish  imprimatur.  Nay,  portions  of  them  may  be  actually  the 
composition  of  Bishops  of  Rome,  or  of  persons  who  acknowledged 
their  supremacy.  What  can  be  said  to  rebut  this  charge  ?  Can 
it  be  pretended  that  there  is  an  exact  chronological  line,  at 
which  what  we  please  to  call  Catholicism  ends  and  what  we  call 
Popery  begins  ?  Would  we  reject  a  prayer  of  Bernard's  as  pass- 
ing the  limit  1  If  not,  may  there  not  by  possibility  be  one  by  A 
Kempis  or  even  by  Pascal,  which  we  would  not  utterly  disown  ? 

To  these  questions  I  answer  precisely  as  I  did  in  the  former  case ; 
I  want  no  chronological  lines.  I  am  quite  ready  to  use  a  prayer 
of  A  Kempis  or  of  Pascal  or  of  many  a  person  less  commonly 
tolerated  among  us.  Why  I  conceive  the  older  prayers  are  in 
general  likely  to  be  better  than  those  which  have  been  composed 
in  any  part  of  Europe  for  several  centuries  I  have  explained ; 
but  that  explanation  has  no  direct  connexion  with  the  question 
before  us.  If  there  be  no  clearer  and  more  palpable  distinction 
between  the  forms  of  the  Catholic  Church  and  those  to  which  the 
Romish  system  has  given  birth,  than  that  which  is  arrived  at  by 
special  pleadings  about  the  date  of  the  birth  or  the  degree  of  the 


304 


SIGNS  OF  A 


soundness  of  particular  men,  I  at  least  would  rather  leave  the  ques- 
tion unresolved. 

But  if  the  main  and  characteristic  glory  of  the  Church  be  pre- 
cisely this,  that  it  is  brought  into  the  Holiest  of  the  Holies,  not 
into  the  figure  of  the  true,  but  into  the  presence  of  God  himself ;  if 
this  be  the  grand  point  of  separation  between  older  forms  and  the 
cold  efforts  of  modern  devotions,  that  with  holy  fear  and  confidence 
they  claim  this  privilege  ;  if  ascriptions  to  the  name  of  the  Father, 
the  Son,  and  the  Holy  Ghost  are  continually  on  the  lips,  always 
in  the  hearts,  of  those  who  wrote  them,  giving  at  once  the  essence 
and  the  body  to  their  supplications  ;  if  each  individual  member  of 
the  Church  be  in  these  forms  supposed  to  join  with  the  whole  of  it 
in  every  act  of  confession,  of  petition,  or  of  thanksgiving ;  if  this 
union  of  each  with  all  be  involved  in  the  fact  that  these  prayers 
are  offered  up  for  the  merits  and  mediation  of  the  one  Lord  of  the 
whole  body  ;  if  it  is  on  the  ground  of  these  merits  and  this  media- 
tion, that  the  poorest  member  of  the  flock  may  join  with  saints  and 
angels  about  the  throne  because  the  virtue  and  life  of  both  are  in 
Him ;  if  to  these  same  causes  is  owing  the  freedom  of  the  older 
prayers  from  those  fetters  of  time  and  locality  which  mankind  in 
the  person  of  its  King  has  shaken  off ;  if  therefore  in  these  quali- 
ties consists  their  Catholicity,  we  have  another,  a  more  righteous 
and  a  more  safe  measure  for  determining  the  value  of  the  system 
which  takes  to  itself  the  Catholic  name.  For  that  this  system  does 
in  its  mildest  form  embody  the  doctrine — men  who  are  members  of 
Christ's  Church  and  body  cannot  enter  into  the  Holiest  of  the 
Holies,  cannot  present  themselves  before  God,  cannot  ascend  up 
where  Christ  has  gone  before  them,  unless  they  approach  through 
intervening  mediators;  that  this  notion  is  practically  and  con- 
stantly embodied  in  those  forms  which  would  be  recognised  by  all  as 
truly  and  properly  Romish ;  that  the  mediators  are  not  merely 
ideals  of  human  excellence  and  beauty,  but  also  the  helpers  and 
heroes  of  particular  towns,  professions,  individuals  ;  thus  much  will 
not  be  denied  even  by  those  who  are  most  eager  to  disclaim  the 
charge  of  positive  idolatry.  Now,  more  than  this  I  do  not  want. 
I  do  not  care  to  dwell  upon  those  practical  results  which  seem 
to  me  to  have  followed  quite  inevitably,  and  by  a  far  stronger  ne- 
cessity than  a  mere  logical  one,  though  by  that  also,  from  these 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


305 


premises,  I  do  not  care  to  establish  the  fact,  which  seems  to  me 
written  with  sunbeams 0i  the  history  of  Europe,  that  a  continually 
downward  progress  from  divine  worship  to  hero-worship,  from 
hero-worship  to  natural  must  be  the  consequence,  when  that  first 
fatal  step  is  taken  of  doubting  or  denying  that  the  communion  be- 
tween God  and  his  creatures  is  really  established  in  the  incarnate 
Son,  that  the  union  of  men  with  their  Lord  has  been  completed 
and  cemented  in  Him.  I  simply  take  my  stand  upon  this  ground. 
I  say,  "  By  these  acts  you  Romanists  have  set  aside  so  far  as  in 
you  lies,  the  very  meaning  and  end  of  the  Church's  existence ; 
have  destroyed  the  very  principle  of  its  union  and  fellowship  ;  you 
have  reduced  it  into  a  set  of  incoherent  fragments  held  together  by 
no  divine  law,  and  therefore  needing  some  wretched  human  law 
to  give  it  consistency."  I  repeat  it,  as  for  as  in  you  lay,  for  you 
have  not  done  the  work.  A  mightier  power  has  been  traversing  your 
schemes  and  preparing  the  way  for  their  ultimate  confusion  and  dis- 
comfiture. Not  without  you,  but  within  you  has  there  been  a  seed  of 
life  with  which  these  seeds  of  corruption  and  death  have  been 
seeking  to  amalgamate,  because  they  could  not  destroy  it.  These 
old,  holy,  reverent  forms  have  been  mocking  your  inventions  as  no 
vulgar  Protestant  scoffer  was  ever  able  to  mock  them,  mocking 
them  by  witnessing  that  the  blessings  which  they  offered  were  not 
too  great  for  men  to  dream  of,  but  too  poor  and  pitiful  for  them 
not  to  trample  under  their  feet  when  once  they  know  out  of  what 
curse  they  have  been  delivered  and  to  what  height  they  have  been 
raised. 

These  forms  witness  to  us  of  holy  men  whom  we  are  to  remem- 
ber, and  with  whose  special  graces  we  may  sympathize,  just  be- 
cause we  are  united  like  them,  to  Him  of  whose  fulness  all  have 
received,  and  grace  for  grace.  Let  them  be  multiplied  if  you  will, 
let  each  age  contribute  its  quota  to  the  goodly  company,  let  all  the 
blessings  which  through  them  Christ  has  bestowed  upon  his  flock 
or  upon  any  the  least  portion  of  it  (for  blessings  to  a  part  are 
blessings  to  the  whole),  be  thankfully  commemorated.  The  forms 
bear  no  protest  against  such  recollections  ;  rather  teach  how  it  is 
possible  rightly  to  entertain  them.  But  the  moment  any  one  of 
these  holy  men  is  so  regarded,  that  his  translation  out  of  this  world 
shall  not  be  a  sign  to  the  poorest  man  who  stays  in  it  of  his  own 


306 


SIGNS  OF  A 


fellowship  with  an  unseen  Lord,  but  shall  rather  he  a  restraint 
upon  his  spirit,  a  fleshly  impediment  to^ommunion,  an  earthly 
dream  to  obscure  the  vision  of  a  heavenly  reality,  that  moment  the 
principle  of  these  forms  is  assaulted,  and  any  new  language  which 
may  be  introduced  into  them  sanctioning  such  an  inversion  or 
denial  of  the  doctrine  of  the  communion  of  saints  stands  out  in 
the  most  broad  and  palpable  contradiction  to  the  living  words  in 
which  they  have  embodied  it. 

These  forms  invite  us  on  certain  days  to  remember  our  Lord's 
acts,  condescensions,  humiliation,  triumph.  They  teach  us  that 
if  we  forget  the  days,  we  shall  be  in  danger  of  forgetting  that 
of  which  they  speak,  and  therefore  of  sinking  back  into  that  dark, 
idolatrous,  divided  state,  out  of  which  by  Christ's  work  we  have 
been  brought  (seeing  that  there  is  not  and  cannot  be  any  return  to 
the  state  of  Jewish  outlooking  and  hope  ;  denying  the  fulfilment, 
we  lose  also  the  expectation  ;  every  thing  but  a  confused  dream 
of  a  possible  blessing).  But,  if  through  any  degrading  sensiti- 
zation of  this  testimony,  men  shall  come  to  fancy  that  the  Church 
is  not  really  redeemed,  justified,  and  glorified  in  Christ,  but  that  by 
the  keeping  of  these  days,  or  by  any  observances  whereby  they 
preserve  their  own  fellowship  with  the  Church,  these  yet  unob- 
tained  blessings  are  to  be  purchased,  then  the  forms  which  com- 
memorate these  days,  as  the  great  signs  and  trophies  of  Christ's 
accomplished  wotk,  do  far  more  by  anticipation  to  refute  such  a 
shameful  and  ignominious  delusion,  than  all  the  words  which  can 
be  devised  after  it  has  become  prevalent.  These  forms  authorize 
certain  days  and  seasons,  during  which,  the  members  of  Christ's 
body  may  enter  into  his  humiliation,  and  chasten  themselves  with 
his  stripes,  that  so  they  may  keep  down  the  evil  inclinations  which 
separate  them  from  their  brethren,  may  sympathize  in  the  sorrows 
of  mankind,  may  realize  the  blessings  which  are  given  to  the  whole 
Church.  But,  if  any  selfish  and  lying  spirit  should  go  forth  pro- 
claiming that  by  these  fasts  and  penances  for  subduing  the  flesh  that 
blessing  is  to  be  obtained  which  is  given  without  money  and  price, 
that  by  them  the  individual  man  who  performs  them  is  put  into  a 
higher  individual  condition,  and  has  a  right  to  claim  something  for 
himself  on  that  score  which  as  an  ordinary  Churchman  is  not  his, 
then  these  forms  of  humiliation  do  pour  such  contempt  upon  that 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  307 

godless  and  uncatholic  pride,  as  no  one  who  thinks  all  restraints 
upon  self-indulgence  vain  and  childish  has  ever  been  able  to  ex- 
press. 

I  might  go  on  through  a  number  of  other  cases,  but  these  will 
suffice  as  hints.  They  prove,  I  think,  that  there  lies  hid  in  these 
ancient  forms  of  worship,  something  of  that  power  which  I  attri- 
buted to  Baptism  and  the  Creed;  a  power  before  which  all  human 
systems,  and  therefore  the  Romish,  the  most  complete  of  them  all, 
must  at  last  shrink  and  quail. 


SECTION  IV. 

THE  EUCHARIST. 

In  all  those  old  forms  of  worship  of  which  we  have  been  speak- 
ing, there  is  one  service  which  is  supposed  to  be  of  a  higher  cha- 
racter than  all  the  rest,  and  to  give  them  their  worth  and  their 
interpretation.  This  is  the  service  which  belongs  to  a  feast,  called 
sometimes  the  Lord's  Supper,  sometimes  the  Eucharist,  sometimes 
the  Communion. 

This  feast  does  exist  at  this  day  in  every  part  of  Europe,  in 
various  districts  of  Asia,  of  America,  of  Africa.  It  has  existed  for 
1800  years.  It  has  survived,  therefore,  all  those  changes  of  which 
we  spoke  when  we  were  considering  Baptism  and  the  Creed;  it 
has  been  the  most  holy  symbol  to  nations  between  which  race,  poli- 
tical institutions,  acquired  habits,  had  established  the  most  seem- 
ingly impassable  barriers.  In  each  of  these  nations,  during  that 
course  of  years,  there  have  been  endless  conflicts  between  rich  and 
poor,  nobles  and  plebeians.  Nevertheless  this  feast,  during  the  time 
when  these  conflicts  were  the  greatest,  was  acknowledged  as  the 
highest  gift  to  the  great,  and  yet  as  one  in  which  the  lowest  were 
intended  to  share.  During  the  same  period  the  boundary  line  be- 
tween the  untaught  and  the  scholar  was  even  stronger  and  more 
marked  than  that  which  w^s  made  by  wealth  or  honours.  The 
baron  might  need  the  help  of  the  serf ;  the  student  seemed  to  dwell 
in  a  region  altogether  his  own,  yet  he  acknowledged  that  in  this 
feast  he  found  the  deepest,  most  unfathomable  subject  for  his 
thoughts  and  speculations,  and  that  the  most  unlearned  might  pos- 


308 


SIGNS  OF  A 


sess  its  blessings  as  much  as  himself.  When  the  Reformation  came 
it  may  be  supposed  that  one  at  least  of  these  phenomena  ceased ; 
that  this  feast  was  no  longer  regarded  as  the  centre  round  which 
religious  and  philosophical  meditations  naturally  revolved.  Un- 
questionably there  was  a  change  in  this  respect ;  it  was  the  effort 
of  the  Reformation  to  detach  itself  from  this  centre ;  to  a  certain 
extent  the  different  reformed  bodies  succeeded  in  discovering  each 
a  separate  centre  for  itself.  But  it  is  equally  true,  that  in  spite  of 
this  effort  the  Reformers  were  compelled  to  make  their  views  re- 
specting this  feast  the  characteristic  and  distinguishing  feature  of 
their  systems.  Because  they  could  not  agree  respecting  its  cha- 
racter and  validity,  ail  the  terrors  of  a  common  enemy,  all  the 
sympathies  w7hich  attracted  them  to  each  other,  were  insufficient  to 
bind  them  together. 

Through  the  seventeenth  century  the  strife  continued ;  new 
religious  and  philosophical  systems  were  completed  or  established ; 
still  the  Eucharist,  in  Protestant,  no  less  than  in  Romish  countries, 
was  a  strange  remnant  of  the  past,  which  could  not  be  passed  over, 
which  it  was  most  hard  to  compress  into  any  of  the  systems,  and 
yet  which  must  be  brought  into  them,  seeing  that  it  was  continu- 
ally asserting  its  power  in  defiance  of  them.  The  eighteenth  cen- 
tury came,  and  the  same  processes  which  were  used  for  shutting  out 
the  invisible  in  every  other  direction,  were  applied  also  in  this. 
And  yet  tens  of  thousands  of  men  and  women  in  every  part  of 
Europe,  would  in  that  day  have  rather  parted  with  their  lives,  or 
with  any  thing  more  dear  to  them,  than  with  this  feast.  And  now 
in  this  nineteenth  centuiy  there  are  not  a  few  persons,  who,  medi- 
tating on  these  different  experiments,  have  arrived  at  this  deep  and 
inward  conviction,  that  the  question  whether  Christianity  shall  be 
a  practical  principle  and  truth  in  the  hearts  of  men,  or  shall  be 
exchanged  for  a  set  of  intellectual  notions  or  generalizations,  de- 
pends mainly  on  the  question  whether  the  Eucharist  shall  or  shall 
not  be  acknowledged  and  received  as  the  bond  of  a  universal  life, 
and  the  means  whereby  men  become  partakers  of  it. 

Supposing  this  notion  to  be  utterly  extravagant  and  false,  yet 
it  must  be  interesting  to  know  what  the  institution  is  which  seems 
to  have  obtained  so  many  willing  and  so  many  reluctant  testimonies 
to  its  importance.    Now  to  describe  its  nature  may  be  difficult, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


309 


without  entering  on  some  of  the  points  upon  which  these  parties 
are  disagreed.  But  its  origin  is  not  a  matter  of  dispute.  Protest- 
ants, Romanists,  Greeks,  all  who  receive  it,  refer  it  to  the  same 
period  of  time,  and  practise  it  in  obedience  to  the  same  authority. 
All  would  say, '  The  night  before  the  crucifixion  of  Jesus  Christ, 
when  He  was  keeping  the  passover  with  his  disciples,  He  took 
bread  and  wine,  and  blessed  them,  saying,  "  This  is  my  body, 
this  is  my  blood ;  do  this  in  remembrance  of  me."  This  is  the 
meaning  of  our  custom ;  we  continue  it  in  subjection  to  this  com- 
mand.' 

Now  these  words  were  addressed  to  a  little  band  of  disciples ; 
to  them,  and  only  to  them.  There  was  no  multitude  present,  as  in 
the  case  of  many  of  our  Lord's  discourses;  no  distant  bystanders 
to  whom  the  sentence  might  apply  :  "  What  I  say  unto  you,  I  say 
unto  all."  Neither  is  there  any  express  language  affirming  that 
the  command  given  to  these  poor  fishermen  on  that  night  was 
meant  to  extend  to  other  ages.  They  might  only  signify  that  a 
person  who  had  been  deeply  beloved  was  leaving  with  the  friends 
from  whom  He  was  about  to  be  separated  a  token  and  memorial 
of  his  intercourse  with  them.  The  words,  indeed,  "  This  is  my 
body,  this  is  my  blood,"  might  sound  strange  and  hyperbolical, 
especially  in  a  moment  of  what  seemed  final  separation,  for  then 
the  utterances  of  such  a  friend  would  be  especially  simple  and  aw- 
ful, as  we  know  that  his  other  utterances  were ;  but  yet  they  might 
only  signify,  This  will  remind  you  of  my  person,  and  this  of  the 
blood  which  is  about  to  be  so  unrighteously  shed.  Such  an  expla- 
nation, however  embarrassing,  would  be  the  easiest,  nay,  it  would 
be  the  only  possible  one,  unless  there  were  some  circumstances  con- 
nected with  the  whole  character  of  Him  who  spake  the  words,  with 
his  other  acts  and  purposes,  with  the  time  when  they  were  spoken, 
which  determined  them  to  a  different  sense. 

Suppose  now  that  the  person  who  spoke  these  words  was  the 
Son  of  man  and  the  Son  of  God ;  suppose  at  the  very  time  He 
spoke  them  He  had  been  declaring  himself  to  be  the  way 
through  which  men  must  come  to  the  unseen  Father,  to  be  the 
truth,  to  be  the  life,  to  be  in  that  relation  to  his  disciples  in  which 
the  vine  is  to  its  branches,  to  be  about  to  bestow  upon  them  a 
Spirit  who  should  guide  them  into  the  knowledge  of  the  Father 


310 


SIGNS  OF  A 


and  of  the  Son ;  suppose  Him  to  have  told  his  disciples  that  they 
were  the  appointed  messengers  of  these  truths  to  men ;  suppose 
Him  to  have  prayed  that  not  only  they,  but  all  who  should  believe 
in  Him  through  their  word  might  be  one  in  Him  as  He  and  the 
Father  were  one  ;  suppose  Him  to  have  connected  all  these  myste- 
rious words  with  the  giving  up  of  Himself  to  death ;  suppose  death 
to  have  been  felt  in  all  ages  and  in  all  countries  to  be  the  great 
barrier  between  the  visible  and  the  invisible  world  ;  suppose  sacri- 
fice, or  the  giving  up  of  certain  animals  to  death,  and  the  offering 
them  to  some  unseen  Ruler,  had  been  felt  in  all  countries  which 
attained  to  any  thing  like  national  fellowship  and  consistency  to  be 
the  means  whereby  they  could  approach  that  Ruler's  presence, 
obtain  his  favor,  remove  his  wrath  ;  suppose  sacrifices  to  have 
been  the  most  essential  part  of  the  Jewish  institutions,  the  most 
important  element  in  their  worship,  the  only  way  whereby  they 
could  draw  nigh,  as  members  of  a  nation,  to  the  God  of  their 
nation ;  suppose  them,  however,  to  have  been  taught,  both  by  the 
law  which  appointed  those  sacrifices  and  by  the  prophets  who  ex- 
pounded it,  that  they  were  not  valuable  for  their  own  sakes,  but 
were  accepted  when  they  were  performed  by  God's  appointment, 
through  his  priests,  as  a  confession  on  the  part  of  the  offerer  that 
he  had  violated  his  relation  to  the  head  of  the  commonwealth  and 
to  its  members,  as  a  submission  of  the  will,  as  a  prayer  to  be  re- 
stored to  that  position  which  through  self-  will  had  been  lost,  or 
else  as  a  means  of  expressing  that  entire  self-surrender  which  was 
implied  in  the  fact  of  belonging  to  the  divine  society ;  suppose  that 
the  feast  which  the  disciples  were  keeping  with  their  Master  was 
the  most  purely  national  and  strictly  sacrificial  of  all  the  feasts, 
that  one  which  celebrated  the  first  deliverance  and  establishment 
of  the  nation,  and  which  recalled  the  fact  that  it  was  a  nation 
based  upon  sacrifices  in  which  every  Jew  realized  the  blessings  of 
his  covenant,  rejoiced  that  God  was  his  King,  knew  that  he  was 
indeed  an  Israelite ;  suppose  all  this,  and  then  consider  whether 
that  which  seemed  the  only  possible  interpretation  of  Christ's 
words,  though  a  most  difficult  and  perplexing  one,  do  not  become 
actually  irrational  and  monstrous  ? 

Consider  whether  any  one  who  believed  wThat  we  know  the 
Apostles  did  believe  respecting  their  Master,  his  Person,  his  king- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


311 


dom,  could  attach  any  but  the  very  highest  significance  to  lan- 
guage concerning  his  body  and  blood.  Consider  whether  any 
persons  who  believed  what  we  know  they  believed  respecting  their 
own  office  and  work,  could  imagine  that  this  significance  was 
limited  and  temporary.  Consider,  whether  persons  wTho  connect- 
ed, as  we  know  they  did  connect,  the  kingdom  whereof  they  were 
ministers  with  the  earlier  dispensations,  could  believe  otherwise 
than  that,  by  the  same  simple,  wonderful  method  which  had  been 
used  in  all  countries,  and  had  been  appointed,  as  they  believed,  by 
the  authority  of  God  himself  in  their  own,  by  the  method  which 
had  enabled  the  Jews  to  enter  into  the  fruition  of  their  covenant  and 
its  privileges,  and  the  neglect  of  which  had  again  and  again  cheated 
them  of  it,  He  meant  to  put  them  in  possession  of  all  the  sub- 
stantial good  things  which  He  came  to  bestow  upon  mankind  ? 
Could  they  doubt  that  when  they  ate  this  bread  and  drank  this 
wine,  He  meant  that  they  should  have  the  fullest  participation  of 
that  sacrifice  with  which  God  had  declared  himself  well-pleased — 
that  they  should  really  enter  into  that  Presence,  into  which  the 
forerunner  had  for  them  entered — that  they  should  really  receive 
in  that  communion  all  the  spiritual  blessings  which,  through  the 
union  of  the  Godhead  wTith  human  flesh,  the  heirs  of  this  flesh 
might  inherit  ?  Could  they  doubt  that  the  state  of  individual  death 
which  they  had  claimed  for  themselves  in  Baptism,  was  here  to  be 
practically  attained  by  fellowship  with  Christ's  death ;  that  the 
new  life  which  they  had  claimed  for  themselves,  as  members  of 
Christ's  body,  was  here  to  be  attained  through  the  communication 
of  his  life  ?  Could  they  doubt  that  if  their  spirits  were  to  be  raised 
up  to  behold  the  infinite  and  absolute  glory,  here  they  were  ad- 
mitted into  that  blessedness  ?  that  if  their  hearts  and  affections  de- 
sired a  manifested  and  embodied  king,  here  they  became  united  to 
Him  ?  that  if  spirit,  soul,  and  body  were  to  be  subjected  to  the 
government  of  God's  Spirit,  that  each  might  be  delivered  from  its 
own  corruption,  receive  its  own  quickening,  and  exert  its  own  liv- 
ing powers,  here  each  received  that  strength  and  renewal  by  which 
it  was  enabled  to  do  its  appointed  work,  to  overcome  its  peculiar 
temptations,  to  be  fitted  for  its  future  perfection?  Could  they 
doubt  that  if  they  were  baptized  into  the  name  of  the  Father,  the 
Son,  and  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  if  this  deepest  unity  were  the  foun- 


312 


SIGNS  OF  A 


dation  of  such  a  union  among  men  as  no  barrier  of  time,  or  space, 
or  death,  could  break,  here  they  were  actually  received  into  com- 
munion with  that  awful  name,  and  into  communion  with  all  the 
saints  who  live  by  beholding  it  and  delighting  in  it  ?  Could  they 
doubt  that  here  the  partial  views,  and  one-sided  words,  and  oppos- 
ing thoughts  of  men,  found  their  meeting-point,  and  complete  re- 
conciliation ?  that  here  lay  the  clear  vital  expression  of  those  dis- 
tinctions which  in  verbal  theology  become  dry,  hard,  dogmatic  oppo- 
sitions? that  here  it  is  apprehended  how  faith  alone  justifies,  and 
how  faith  without  works  is  dead?  how  it  is  we  that  act,  and  yet  not 
we,  but  Christ  in  us  ?  how  he  that  is  born  of  God  cannot  commit 
sin,  and  yet  if  we  say  we  have  no  sin  we  deceive  ourselves  ?  how 
we  may  be  persuaded  that  neither  life  nor  death,  nor  things  present, 
nor  things  to  come,  shall  separate  us  from  the  love  of  God  which 
is  in  Christ,  yet  may  tremble  lest  we  should  be  castaways  ?  Could 
they  doubt  that  it  was  their  office  to  present  Christianity  in  its  dif- 
ferent aspects  to  the  different  wants  and  circumstances  of  their  own 
age  and  of  ages  to  come ;  that  it  was  the  office  of  this  sacrament 
to  exhibit  it  as  a  whole  truth,  at  once  transcendent  and  practical, 
surpassing  men's  thoughts,  independent  on  men's  faith  and  opi- 
nions, and  yet  essentially  belonging  to  man,  the  governing  law  of 
his  being,  the  actuating  power  of  his  life  ?  Could  they  doubt  that 
they  were  to  lay  the  foundation  of  the  Church  on  earth,  and  that 
this  sacrament  was  to  give  it  permanency,  coherency,  vitality 
throughout  all  generations  ?  And  if  this  were  their  faith,  why,  I 
ask,  is  it  not  to  be  ours?  What  has  happened  to  rob  this  sacra- 
ment of  its  meaning,  or  to  make  that  meaning  less  applicable  to  us 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  than  it  was  to  those  who  lived  in  the 
first, — less  necessary  for  us  than  it  was  for  them  ?  The  answers 
to  these  questions  are  various. 

Objections. — The  Quaker. 

In  this  case,  as  in  that  of  Baptism,  the  Quaker  believes  that  we 
have  adhered  dangerously  to  Jewish  precedent,  have  preserved  signs 
when  they  should  have  been  abolished,  have  followed  shadows 
when  the  spiritual  subtance  was  that  which  we  should  have  ap- 
prehended. But  here  the  sin  is  more  flagrant.  The  essence  of 
Christianity  lies  in  the  reality  of  the  sacrifice  which  we  after  the 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


313 


example  and  by  the  power  of  Christ  are  able  to  offer  up.  For  the 
surrender  of  ourselves,  the  true  self-annihilation,  this  ceremony  is 
substituted,  a  ceremony  clothed  with  great  names  and  fictitious  at- 
tributes, in  order  that  we  may  excuse  ourselves  from  the  necessity 
6f  any  practical  sacrifice. 

I  am  not  unwilling  to  answer  the  charge  of  tautology,  for  the 
sake  of  noticing;  again  the  first  and  more  general  of  these  com- 
plaints.  For  they  receive  a  new  and  most  valuable  illustration 
from  the  special  arguments  which  are  connected  with  them.  It 
will  be  remembered  that  the  difference  between  us  and  the  Quakers 
in  the  other  instance  seemed  to  be  this.  They  suppose  that  the 
Christian  Covenant,  because  it  is  spiritual,  dispenses  with  that 
method  which  was  sanctioned  by  Divine  authority  in  the  earlier 
dispensation.  We  believe  that  the  Christian  Covenant,  because  it 
is  more  spiritual  than  the  Jewish,  requires  another  application  of 
the  same  method  in  order  that  the  difference  may  be  perceived. 
Having  the  sign  of  the  lower  covenant  to  compare  with  the  sign  of 
the  higher,  I  can  understand  wherein  the  one  surpasses  the  other ; 
the  Quaker,  being  unable  to  make  any  such  comparison,  only  talks 
of  the  distinction,  cannot  apprehend  it  in  fact,  cannot  even  express 
it  in  language;  while  he  rates  the  old  far  below  its  true  value,  he 
yet  continually  in  his  thoughts  reduces  the  new  to  a  level  with  it, 
in  his  practice  makes  the  perfect  spirituality  of  the  latter  to  consist 
merely  in  the  absence  of  a  characteristic,  which  the  degree  of 
spirituality  possessed  by  the  former  made  necessary.  Thus  much 
with  reference  to  the  preliminary  act  or  condition  of  the  covenant. 
Applying  the  same  rule  to  the  results,  privileges,  and  enjoyments 
of  it,  the  Quaker  asserts  that  the  Jew  realized  the  blessings  of  his 
covenant  in  a  sacrificial  feast;  that  the  blessings  of  ours  being 
spiritual,  such  a  method  is  impossible.  We  affirm,  that  the  privi- 
leges which  the  Jew  realized  in  his  festivals  were  spiritual  privi- 
leges; that  the  privilege  of  looking  up  to  an  invisible  Guide  and 
King  and  Friend,  and  rejoicing  in  Him,  was  a  spiritual  privilege; 
that  the  privilege  of  feeling  themselves  a  nation  was  a  spiritual 
privilege ;  that  these  are  emphatically  the  privileges  which  the  spirit 
of  man  craves  for ;  that  God  gave  them  to  him  in  a  most  simple, 
reasonable  method;  and  that  when  we  understand  what  the  things 
given  were,  it  becomes  difficult  to  imagine,  how  by  any  other 


314 


SIGNS  OF  A 


method  they  could  have  been  received.  We  affirm  again  that  our 
privileges  are  higher  than  those  of  the  Jews,  but  higher  only  as 
being  the  perfection  of  what  they  had  imperfectly.  They  are  the 
privileges  still  of  fellowship  with  God,  of  fellowship  with  our 
brethren ;  but  of  fellowship  with  God  as  with  a  Being  who  has  entered 
into  a  direct  union  with  our  race  in  the  Person  of  his  Son ;  of  fel- 
lowship with  a  Race  in  its  Head,  not  merely  a  particular  Nation. 
Now  we  want  to  know  what  there  is  in  the  character  of  these 
blessings  which  makes  a  united  festival  unsuitable  for  the  realiza- 
tion of  them  ?  It  was  suitable,  nay,  actually  necessary  for  the 
realization  of  the  others;  show  us  in  some  other  way  than  by 
merely  repeating  the  words,  carnal  and  spiritual,  how  the  change 
has  taken  place  ? 

We  grant  most  freely  that  there  must  be  a  change  in  the  nature 
of  the  institution  appropriate  to  a  change  in  the  nature  of  that  which 
it  expresses.  We  grant  that  Christianity  is  nothing,  if  it  be  not  the 
actualization  and  substantiation  of  a  union  which  was  before  to  a 
great  extent  prophetical  and  ideal.  We  grant  that  a  mere  shadow,  a 
pictorial  feast,  would  be  more  inconsistent  with  the  nature  of  the  Gos- 
pel, than  even  of  the  Law — though  inconsistent  with  either,  seeing 
that  in  each  case  the  feast  ought  to  put  the  receivers  of  it  into  actual 
possession  of  that  which  at  the  time  they  were  capable  of  possess- 
ing. But  admitting  all  this,  the  questions  recur,  "  Can  there  be  no 
feast  which  is  applicable  to  the  position  of  Christians,  as  the  feast 
of  the  Passover  was  to  that  of  the  Jews  1  Have  those  who  deny 
the  existence  of  such  a  feast,  stigmatizing  it  as  a  mere  ceremony 
and  phantasm,  shown  that  they  retain  the  substance  of  Christianity  ?" 

To  examine  this  last  point,  let  us  consider  why  it  is  that  the 
Quaker  protests  against  this  particular  institution.  The  Christian 
sacrifice,  he  says,  ought  to  be  real ;  the  giving  up  of  a  man's  own 
self  to  death  according  to  the  example  of  our  Lord  and  Saviour. 
Our  Lord's  death  in  itself  was  most  real,  carried  into  every  act 
which  He  performed  and  every  word  which  He  spoke ;  how  can 
we  think  that  we  manifest  that  death  in  a  service  less  actual,  indi- 
vidual, continuous  1  From  this  statement  it  will  be  seen  at  once, 
that  the  end  of  Christianity,  according  to  the  Quaker,  is  individual 
self-denial  or  self-sacrifice.  Christ  perfectly  sacrificed  Himself; 
by  Christ's  power  in  us  we  may  do  the  like ;  this  is  their  habitual 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


315 


language.  Now  that  Christianity  involves  this,  that  there  is  no 
meaning  in  it  if  the  principle  of  self-sacrifice  be  not  at  the  root  of 
it,  I  believe  I  acknowledge  as  strongly  as  he  can.  Bat  as  we  both 
agree  that  our  Lord's  example  is  the  one  by  which  we  are  to  shape 
ourselves,  that  the  type  of  sacrifice  is  in  Him,  I  must  inquire  whether 
He  referred  to  sacrifice  as  the  object  of  his  life,  or  only  as  the  in- 
dispensable condition  of  it.  The  answer  which  He  gives  on  this 
point  seems  to  me  very  express.  He  declares  that  he  came  to  glo- 
rify his  Father's  Name,  to  do  his  Father's  Will.  He  declares  that 
He  came  to  die  for  the  sheep.  Because  He  glorified  his  Father's 
Name  and  would  not  glorify  his  own  ;  because  He  would  not  be 
an  individual  man  but  would  identify  Himself  with  the  lowest  con- 
dition of  those  whom  He  was  not  ashamed  to  call  his  brethren, 
therefore  do  we  see  in  Him  the  perfect  example  of  self-sacrifice. 
The  whole  idea  of  his  life  is  lost  the  moment  we  forget  this.  Im- 
agine Him  coming  into  the  world  not  to  manifest  God,  but  to  ex- 
hibit a  specimen  of  glorious  heroic  self-sacrifice  ;  not  to  die  for  men, 
but  to  show  how  He  could  die,  and  the  example  perishes.  We 
have  an  object  presented  to  us  which  no  man  who  has  been  used 
to  contemplate  his  Lord  with  any  thing  of  love  or  devotion,  could 
bear  to  look  at.  And  yet  if  we  believe  that  the  end  we  are  to 
keep  in  view  in  our  own  lives  is  this  of  self-annihilation,  we  either 
must  make  this  change  in  the  image  we  profess  to  copy,  or  else 
forget  it  altogether  and  fix  your  eyes  only  upon  ourselves. 

Nor  is  this  all,  as  the  history  of  the  Quakers  has  proved.  This 
doctrine  of  self-sacrifice  and  self-annihilation,  when  it  has  not  led 
them  into  conscious  self-righteousness  and  self-glorification,  has  oc- 
casioned a  miserable  confusion  respecting  their  own  lives  and  duties. 
If  the  Spirit  of  Christ,  they  have  said  to  themselves,  be  leading  us  to 
entire  crucifixion,  how  can  wTe  resist  Him  by  keeping  alive  any  pe- 
culiar affection  or  faculty  1  And  yet  the  same  conscience  which 
seemed  to  enjoin  this  duty,  said  also,  How  dare  you  crush  those 
powers,  energies,  and  afTections  which  God  has  given  you,  and  of 
which  you  are  to  render  an  account  to  Him  ?  The  difficulty  is 
most  practical,  the  contradiction  most  agonizing.  And  the  fruits 
of  it  to  those  who  have  witnessed  it  have  been  as  distressing  as  to 
those  who  have  been  exercised  by  it :  one  part  of  them,  thinking 
that  such  feelings  must  be  the  consequence  of  a  dark  superstition, 


316 


SIGNS  OF  A 


fly  to  infidelity  or  indifference ;  another,  more  earnest  and  sincere, 
seeing  that  the  sacrifice  of  Christ  has  been  lost  sight  of  in  these 
efforts  after  self-sacrifice,  have  violently  denounced  all  such  efforts 
as  godless  and  vain,  and  adopting  sound  language  respecting  the 
all- sufficiency  of  the  one  sacrifice,  have  made  it  a  foundation  for 
Antinomian  doctrine  and  practice. 

But  if  we  kept  this  thought  steadily  before  us,  that  the 
hallowing  of  God's  name  is  the  end  for  which  our  Lord  lived 
and  for  which  we  are  to  live ;  that  to  give  Him  thanks  and 
praise  for  that  which  He  is,  and  for  that  which  He  has  done, 
and  so  to  enter  into  the  perception  and  apprehension  of  that 
which  He  is  and  that  which  He  has  done,  is  the  highest 
felicity  which  we  can  attain ;  that  our  Lord  who  was  one 
with  the  Father  did  in  all  the  acts  of  his  life  exhibit  this  perfect 
sympathy  with  Him  and  delight  in  Him,  and  submission  to  Him ; 
that  the  voluntary  sacrifice  of  his  body  to  death  was  the  final  and 
consummate  act  of  sympathy,  delight,  submission  ;  that  as  self-will 
and  disobedience  are  the  obstacles  to  the  communion  of  men  with 
their  Creator  so  are  they  obstacles  to  communion  with  each  other; 
that  the  same  act  therefore  which  removed  the  only  obstacle  to  the 
one  communion  removed  also  the  obstacle  to  the  other ;  that  the 
cross  of  Christ  is  the  centre  point  of  all  fellowship  ;  that  while 
we  seek  our  fellowship  there,  affirming  ourselves  to  exist  only  as 
members  of  Christ's  body,  and  to  derive  our  life  from  Him,  we 
may  find  strength  habitually  to  deny  ourselves  according  to  his  ex- 
ample— we  surely  obtain  an  idea  of  Christianity  altogether  differ- 
ent from  the  other,  and  yet  one  which  includes  all  the  practical 
truth  of  it,  and  which  must  have  hovered  as  we  know  it  did  hover 
before  the  minds  of  the  early  Quakers,  in  order  that  they  might  be 
able  to  conceive  their  own  narrow  and  fragmentary  notion.  A 
person  who  lives  in  the  light  of  this  truth  must  look  upon  the  sac- 
rifice of  Christ  as  distinct  from  all  other  sacrifices,  because  it  is 
only  by  means  of  it  that  we  are  brought  into  the  presence  of  God 
or  are  made  one  body.  He  cannot  look  upon  the  sacrifice  of  Christ  as 
separate  from  any  other  sacrifice,  because  he  conceives  all  sacrifices 
to  derive  their  worth  and  meaning  from  it.  He  must  regard  self- 
sacrifice  as  the  necessary  element  of  a  Christian  life.  He  cannot 
permit  it  to  assume  a  self-conscious  and  therefore  contradictory 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  317 

character  by  regarding  it  as  the  means  of  procuring  a  blessing, 
when  it  is  in  fact  the  fruit  and  the  fruition  of  a  blessing  already 
procured.  He  must  consider  every  Christian  obliged  to  mortify 
his  selfish  nature,  in  order  that  he  may  offer  an  acceptable  sacrifice 
to  God.  He  cannot  confound  the  mortification  of  the  evil  nature 
with  the  destruction  or  weakening  of  a  single  faculty  which  God 
has  bestowed.  For  those  faculties  are  impaired  and  ruined  by  the 
dominion  of  the  evil  nature ;  they  are  strongest  when  it  is  most 
subdued.  They  must  be  kept  strong  because  God  requires  them 
as  a  sacrifice ;  and  the  more  they  are  sacrificed  to  Him  the  more 
strength  do  they  acquire. 

We  have  seen  then  yet  another  instance  in  which  the  Quaker, 
refusing  to  maintain  what  he  calls  a  mere  form,  has  utterly  pre- 
vented or  lost  a  principle.  I  do  not  charge  it  upon  him  as  a  spe- 
cial sin  that  he  has  inverted  the  notion  of  sacrifice,  has  substituted 
means  for  ends,  has  introduced  self-righteousness  under  the  name 
of  self-forgetfulness.  These  tendencies  are  common  to  all  ages, 
they  are  precisely  the  tendencies  of  our  individualizing  natures. 
In  this  respect  he  is  not  different  from  the  rest  of  men.  The  sin 
which  I  do  charge  him  with  is  this;  that  when  Christ  had,  of  his 
love  and  mercy  to  mankind,  provided  them  with  a  simple  and  won- 
derful testimony  against  these  narrow  notions  and  dividing  tenden- 
cies— when  He  had  embodied  in  a  living  feast  the  complete  idea 
of  his  kingdom,  which  we,  looking  at  things  partially,  from  differ- 
ent sides,  through  the  prejudices  and  false  colourings  of  particular 
times  and  places,  are  continually  reducing  under  some  name, 
notion,  or  formula  of  ours, — when  He  has  made  this  feast  ef- 
fectual for  imparting  to  men  a  faith  far  above  the  level  of  their  ordi- 
nary theories  and  speculations, — when  He  had  given  it  as  a  bond 
to  all  peoples  and  languages  and  generations — they  chose  to  fancy 
that  his  ordinance  signified  nothing,  that  they  had  a  much  better 
storehouse  for  his  truths  in  their  own  fine  thoughts  and  spiritual 
apprehensions.  Of  this  sin  I  maintain  that  they  are  suffering  the 
punishment  in  the  almost  entire  loss  of  that  Spirituality  and  that 
Universality  which  they  hoped  by  these  means  to  attain. 

2.  The  Zuinglian,  the  Calvinist,  the  Lutheran. 

1.  There  is  one  objection  to  my  statements  on  this  subject  in 

21 


318 


SIGNS  OF  A 


which  pure  Protestants  would  in  general  agree.  They  would  say 
that  when  I  call  the  Eucharist  a  sacrificial  feast  I  am  using  danger- 
ous language,  incompatible  with  the  full  recognition  of  Christ's 
finished  sacrifice  upon  the  cross.  "  If  it  be  sacrificial  it  must  be 
propitiatory ;  the  words  are  convertible ;  then  what  becomes  of  the 
doctrine  of  the  Atonement  as  it  was  held  by  the  Reformers'?" 

Starting  from  this  negative  point  of  agreement  our  opponents 
soon  divide  themselves  into  several  classes.  To  the  first  the 
Eucharist  appears  a  mere  memorial  of  a  past  transaction.  When 
I  treat  it  as  a  substantial  feast,  as  in  some  strange  way  identified 
with  the  spiritual  things  of  which  it  speaks,  and  as  being  a  channel 
through  which  actual  blessings  are  received,  I  am  using  phrases  for 
which  Scripture  gives  no  warrant,  and  which  are  contrary  to  plain 
sense  and  experience. 

The  second  class  think  differently.  According  to  them  the  true 
believer  does  realize  in  the  sacrament  an  actual  mysterious  blessing. 
He  not  only  recollects  a  past  good ;  he  is  conscious  of  a  present 
good  :  Christ  is  with  him  in  the  feast.  The  mistake  I  have  com- 
mitted consists  in  supposing  the  good  to  exist  in  the  Sacrament 
apart  from  the  faith  of  the  receiver.  Such  a  doctrine  unsettles  the 
very  foundation  of  Protestant  Christianity. 

The  third  party  by  no  means  agree  in  this  opinion.  They  think 
that  the  Sacrament  has  a  reality  in  it  which  it  does  not  receive 
from  the  mind  of  the  partaker.  Christ  is  actually  consubstantiated 
with  the  elements.  The  error  of  the  principle  I  have  maintained 
consists  in  this,  that  it  supposes  us  to  be  brought  into  a  holy  and 
didine  Presence,  and  yet  offers  no  explanation  of  the  way  in  which  so 
wonderful  a  transaction  takes  place. 

Before  I  consider  the  first  objection,  in  which  Zuinglians,  Lu- 
therans, and  Calvinists  agree,  let  me  remind  my  readers  of  the  re- 
marks which  I  made  under  the  last  head.  I  affirmed  that  Quaker 
history  had  proved  the  incredible  danger  which  results  from  sup- 
posing that  our  Lord's  sacrifice  is  merely  a  pattern  or  example 
of  our  sacrifices,  or  merely  the  power  by  which  these  sacrifices  are 
effected,  it  must  have  an  entirely  distinct  character ;  otherwise  it  is 
of  no  worth  as  an  example  or  as  a  power.  And  I  maintained 
further  that  this  distinct  character,  in  virtue  of  which  it  is  an  ex- 
ample and  a  power,  is  exhibited  in  this  Sacrament,  and  that  by 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


319 


losing  this  Sacrament  the  Quakers  have  lost  the  sense  of  it.  I 
think  these  assertions  hardly  bear  out  the  suspicion  that  I  confound  the 
sacramental  act, — an  act  performed  by  men  and  therefore  their  act, 
by  the  hypothesis  one  of  our  sacrifices, — with  the  sacrifice  of  Christ ; 
or  suppose  the  necessity  of  the  one  to  prove  the  other  incomplete. 
Every  word  I  have  used  leads  to  precisely  the  opposite  conclusion. 
I  have  maintained  that  because  the  sacrifice  had  once  for  all  accom- 
plished the  object  of  bringing  our  race  constituted  and  redeemed 
in  Christ,  into  a  state  of  acceptance  and  union  with  God,  therefore 
it  was  most  fitting  that  there  should  be  an  act  whereby  we  are 
admitted  into  the  blessings  thus  claimed  and  secured  to  us.  And 
because  those  blessings  were  not  given  to  the  generation  which  lived 
in  the  days  of  our  lord's  incarnation  and  death,  but  to  all  genera- 
tions, therefore  is  it  fitting  that  this  act  should  be  renewed  through 
all  generations;  and  because  those  blessings  do  not  belong  to  one 
moment  of  our  existence  but  to  every  moment,  therefore  is  it  fitting 
that  the  act  by  which  we  receive  them  should  continually  be  re- 
newed by  us  during  our  pilgrimage  on  earth.  When  we  say  then 
that  our  feast,  like  that  of  the  Passover,  is  sacrificial,  we  do  not  mean 
that  it  does  not  commemorate  a  blessing  which  has  been  fully 
obtained  and  realized ;  if  we  did  we  should  violate  the  analogy 
in  the  very  moment  of  applying  it  ;  for  the  Passover  did  comme- 
morate a  complete  deliverance  and  the  establishment  of  a  national 
state  in  consequence  of  that  deliverance.  But  as  that  deliverance 
was  accompanied  with  a  sacrificial  act,  and  by  a  sacrificial  act  accom- 
plished,— and  yet  in  this  passover  the  act  was  perpetually  renewed, 
— because  in  this  way  the  nation  understood  that  by  sacrifice  it  sub- 
sisted, and  consisted, — and  because  by  such  a  renewal  its  members 
realized  the  permanent  and  living  character  of  the  good  that  had 
been  bestowed  upon  them,  so  it  is  here.  The  sacrifice  of  Christ  is  that 
with  which  alone  God  can  be  satisfied,  and  in  the  sight  of  which 
alone  He  can  contemplate  our  race  ;  it  is  therefore  the  only  meeting- 
point  of  communion  with  Him  ;  but  this  communion  being  estab- 
lished, it  must  be  by  presenting  the  finished  sacrifice  before  God 
that  we  both  bear  witness  what  our  position  is  and  realize  the  glory 
of  it;  otherwise  we  have  a  name  without  a  reality,  and  with  the 
words  'finished  and  complete'  are  robbing  ourselves  of  the  very  thing 


320 


SIGNS  OF  A 


which  makes  it  so  important  that  we  should  prize  them  and  preserve 
them. 

Why  these  considerations  have  been  overlooked  by  Protestants 
I  think  will  be  evident  from  the  remarks  which  were  made  in  the 
former  part.  The  worth  of  Protestantism  consisted  in  this,  that  it 
asserted  the  distinct  position  of  each  man,  affirming  that  he  was 
a  person  and  not  merely  one  of  a  mass.  This  truth  had  been  work- 
ing itself  out  into  clearness  for  many  centuries,  but  the  process  was 
a  strange  and  painful  one.  The  conscience  is  that  which  tells  each 
man  he  is  a  person,  making  him  feel  that  which  he  has  done  in 
past  time  to  be  his  own,  giving  him  an  awful  assurance  of  identity, 
responsibility,  permanence.  Overburdened  with  the  sense  of  evil, 
it  sought  for  a  remedy  ;  it  was  commanded  to  perform  certain  ser- 
vices in  the  hope  of  rinding  one ;  with  each  attempt  the  sense  of 
moral  evil  increased.  The  Reformers  found  that  the  whole  scheme 
was  a  delusion.  The  services  presumed  that  freedom  of  conscience 
which  men  sought  to  acquire  by  them  ;  without  it  they  were  not 
true  godly  services.  The  emancipation  of  the  conscience  was 
therefore  that  which  they  sought  as  the  step  to  all  good  ;  they  de- 
clared that  by  faith  in  Christ,  grounded  upon  acts  of  complete 
redemption  done  on  their  behalf,  they  could  alone  obtain  it. 

How  true  this  language  was,  what  a  curse  had  come  upon  the 
Church  through  the  denial  of  it/howr  necessary  it  was  that,  at  that 
time  especially  but  also  at  all  times,  it  should  be  proclaimed,  I  have 
contended  again  and  again.  But  it  is  equally  certain  that  as  the 
Quakers  believe  self-sacrifice,  so  the  Reformers  believed  the  eman- 
cipation of  the  conscience  to  be  not  a  necessary  condition  of  our 
moral  being  but  the  end  of  it.  Whatever  contributed  to  this  end 
was  necessary,  whatever  did  not  contribute  to  it  was  worthless. 
The  belief  of  Christ's  sacrifice  upon  the  cross  was  that  which  had 
given  peace  to  their  consciences  ;  that  it  had  any  purpose  save  that 
of  giving  peace  to  the  conscience  was  more  and  more  forgotten. 
And  therefore  it  became  necessary  to  explain  how  it  accomplished 
this  purpose.  Then  began  all  the  theories  about  sacrifice,  satisfac- 
tion, and  imputation,  which  I  spoke  of  as  at  once  so  fatal  to  the 
principles  of  the  Reformation  and  to  the  practical  life  of  Christi- 
anity, as  affording  no  comfort  to  the  humble  heart,  as  leading  to  all 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


321 


disputes  and  separations,  as  preparing  the  way  for  the  infidelity  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  These  hungry  notions  of  the  understand- 
ing being  substituted  for  the  clear,  simple  belief  of  the  Reformers, 
that  we  are  adopted  into  Christ  by  Baptism  and  are  therefore 
children  of  God  and  may  draw  nigh  to  Him  in  all  duties  and  ser- 
vices, confessing  the  sins  which  have  polluted  us  and  separated  us 
from  Him,  turned  everything  into  confusion.  Men  knew  that  they 
were  not  approaching  God  with  pure  consciences  ;  the  Reformers 
said  that  if  they  did  not,  the  service  was  a  mockery  ;  they  therefore 
sought  hither  and  thither  for  some  better  kind  of  faith  which  could 
give  them  relief;  not  finding  it,  they  deemed  the  whole  Gospel  to 
be  a  dream  and  fable. 

2.  But  that  which  lay  beneath  all  these  dark  imaginations  and 
sad  results  was  I  believe  the  imperfect  apprehension  which  the  Re- 
formers themselves  had  of  the  nature  of  the  Communion.  This 
feast,  says  the  Zuinglian,  is  nothing  but  the  memorial  of  a  past 
transaction.  That  it  is  the  memorial  of  a  past  transaction  is  of 
course  assumed  in  every  word  I  have  said.  If  it  were  not  it  could 
have  no  pretence  to  the  name  of  Eucharist ;  it  would  bear  no  analogy 
to  the  Passover.  But  the  Passover  had  not  merely  reference  to  the 
past.  The  Jew  had  been  brought  out  of  Pharaoh's  government 
and  brought  under  God's  government.  In  commemorating  the  past 
emancipation  of  his  nation  he  claimed  for  himself  a  privilege  which 
belonged  to  it  then.  It  would,  I  think,  be  insulting:  the  Zuinglian 
to  suppose  that  he  thought  the  Christian  ordinance,  in  this  respect, 
different  from  its  predecessor.  He  is  particularly  practical  and  ra- 
tional; he  must  thereforeyknow  well  that  no  men  ever  did  or  ever 
could  celebrate  with  the  least  heartiness  and  afTectionateness,  an 
event  which  they  did  not  suppose  in  some  sense  to  be  the  cause  or 
the  commencement  of  an  improved  condition  of  things,  that  con- 
dition of  things  being  one  with  which  they  were  in  some  way 
connected.  The  Zuinglian  then  cannot  mean  by  his  words  "  Sim- 
ple memorial"  that  there  is  nothing  of  present  continuous  interest 
in  it;  if  he  did  he  would  suppose,  contrary  to  all  his  professions, 
that  our  Lord's  religion  imposes,  as  a  test  of  obedience,  a  most  dry, 
dreary,  unmeaning  ceremony.  But  if  he  allows,  as  of  course  he 
will,  that  certain  effects  have  followed  from  our  Lord's  death,  in 
which  we  are  partakers,  and  that  these  effects,  and  not  merely  the 


322 


SIGNS  OF  A 


cause  which  produced  them,  are  recalled  to  us  by  this  feast,  then 
the  question  immediately  occurs,  What  are  these  effects  ?  The 
great  effect  which  we  believe  to  have  proceeded  from  it,  that  in 
which  every  other  is  included,  is  that  thereby  we  are  made  capa- 
ble of  entering  into  the  presence  of  God  ;  that  a  mercy-seat  is  re- 
vealed to  mankind,  where  his  Maker  may  meet  with  him.  Sup- 
posing this  were  so,  this  must  surely  be  one  of  the  effects  which  is 
brought  to  our  recollection  by  the  Eucharist.  I  do  not  object 
to  the  word  recollection  ;  there  is  nothing  in  it  which  is  not  ap- 
plicable to  a  Living  Actual  Presence.  What  I  plead  for  is  the 
duty  of  recollecting  that  presence  in  the  Eucharist,  because  it  is 
there. 

But  the  Zuinglian  will  ask,  Why  there,  and  not  elsewhere? 
The  question  may  bear  two  constructions.  It  may  mean,  Why 
may  we  not  feed  upon  the  sacrifice  of  Christ  at  all  times,  and  thus 
enter  into  the  presence  of  Him  who  perfectly  delights  in  that 
sacrifice  ?  Or  it  may  mean,  God  is  omnipresent ;  why  then  are 
we  not  always  in  his  presence  1  Evidently  these  two  thoughts  are 
of  the  most  different  kind,  and  originate  in  most  different  states  of 
feelin  g  The  first  suggests  to  us  the  highest  standard  of  perfec- 
tion which  a  Christian  can  propose  to  himself,  and  yet  a  standard 
which,  if  what  I  have  said  be  true,  must  be  a  most  real  and  reason- 
able one:  for  that  the  Church  is  brought  into  the  presence  of  God, 
is  the  first  principle  of  the  New  Dispensation,  the  one  which  is 
especially  involved  in  this  sacrament;  and  if  every  one  of  us 
ought  to  consider  himself  a  member  of  the  Church,  this  wonderful 
privilege  belongs  to  us,  not  in  proportion  as  we  raise  ourselves  to 
some  individual  excellence,  but  in  proportion  as  we  renounce  all 
such  distinctions,  and  yield  ourselves  to  the  Spirit  who  dwells  in  the 
whole  body.  What  then  I  should  say,  in  reference  to  this  view  of  the 
case,  is  precisely  what  I  have  said  in  reference  to  the  Quaker  doc- 
trine. If  we  acknowledge  that  the  light  is  somewhere  concen- 
trated, that  it  reveals  itself  to  us  in  some  way  which  it  has  chosen  ; 
that  the  revelation  is  not  for  us  only,  but  for  all ;  if  we  make  this 
acknowledgment  practically,  we  are  at  least  in  the  right  road 
to  the  realization  of  that  blessing  which  it  is  so  truly  affirmed  that 
we  ought  to  seek.  Otherwise  we  shall  fancy  that  we  produce  this 
presence  by  our  acts  of  meditation  or  faith ;  we  glorify  ourselves 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  323 

for  these  acts,  and  for  a  reality  we  get  a  dream ;  then  we  gladly 
betake  ourselves  to  the  other  doctrine,  which  comes  forth  with  the 
boast  that  it  asserts  "  the  Omnipresence  of  the  Deity." 

So  I  believe  it  has  happened  with  the  Zuinglians.  An  early 
disciple  of  the  school,  attaching  an  almost  superstitious  veneration  to 
the  Bible,  would  at  once  have  rejected  this  phrase  as  incompati- 
ble alike  with  its  letter  and  its  spirit.  He  would  have  asked  how 
it  could  be  reconciled  with  the  words  of  the  book  of  Genesis, 
which  speak  of  God  as  meeting  Adam  in  the  garden,  as  coming 
down  to  see  the  tower  which  men  had  builded,  as  appearing  to 
Abraham  at  the  tent-door?  A  Zuinglian  of  the  next  century 
would  have  learnt  perhaps  to  use  the  phrases,  "  figures,"  "  eastern 
allegories,"  and  such  like,  in  reference  to  these  passages.  Still 
he  would  have  said  to  himself,  "  Honest  men  use  allegories  and 
figures  for  some  purpose ;  they  mean  something  by  them  ;  it  is  a 
truth  which  they  wish  to  convey.  But  if  I  admit  these  phrases, 
1  ubiquity,'  6  omnipresence,'  in  their  ordinary  sense,  I  must  sup- 
pose the  word  of  God  less  honest  and  true  than  the  words  of  men  ; 
for  these  stories,  instead  of  implying  or  hinting  a  truth,  involve 
the  direct  contradiction  of  one."  But  a  Zuinglian  of  the  third 
century  will  have  mastered  all  these  difficulties.  He  will  at  once 
dispose  of  these  scriptural  expressions,  by  calling  them  4  anthro- 
pomorphic,' or  indications  of  a  low  state  of  civilization  ;  or  with 
less  honesty  he  will  pass  them  over  altogether,  only  assuming  that 
the  phrase,  "  Omnipresence  of  the  Deity,"  must  be  good  and  true, 
whatever  else,  either  in  the  early  thoughts  and  feelings  of  men,  or 
in  the  revelations  to  which  these  have  been  leading,  should  happen 
to  be  false. 

Let  us  consider  then  for  a  moment  the  philosophy  of  this 
phrase.  It  has  been  adopted  to  convey  the  impression  that  the 
limits  of  space  are  not  applicable  to  a  divine  and  absolute  Being. 
But  does  it  convey  this  impression  to  any  one  who  is  capable  of 
reflecting  upon  his  own  thoughts  ?  Is  "  everywhere"  less  a  word 
of  space  than  "  somewhere  V9  Did  the  ancients  less  imprison  the 
Divine  Essence  in  forms,  when  they  spoke  of  it  as  inhabiting  every 
tree  and  flower,  than  when  they  viewed  it  in  the  person  of  a 
Jupiter  sitting  on  the  Thessalian  mount  1  No !  in  proportion  as 
they  attached  personal  qualities  to  their  Jupiter,  in  proportion  as 


324 


SIGNS  OF  A 


they  believed  that  he  was  capable  of  loving  and  hating,  and  that 
he  had  the  feelings  of  a  father,  they  were  conceiving  of  him  in- 
finitely less  under  the  limits  of  space  (and  of  time  also)  than  when 
they  were  translating  his  name  by  "  the  air,"  and  regarding  him 
as  a  subtile  fluid  diffused  through  every  portion  of  the  universe.  In 
the  one  case  they  were  dreaming  of  a  Spirit  with  whom  men 
might  converse ;  a  Spirit  indeed  mixed  of  good  and  ill — their  own 
image — but  still  to  be  apprehended  by  that  which  is  spiritual  in 
man :  in  the  other  case  their  thoughts  were  wholly  physical ;  not 
the  less  so  for  being  rarefied  and  subtilized ;  or  if  there  wras  any 
thing  else  in  them,  it  was  what  they  derived  from  the  older  faith. 

In  strict  conformity  with  this  principle  is  that  passage  of  our 
Lord's  teaching  which  is  so  often  quoted  to  prove  a  very  different 
doctrine.  He  told  the  woman  of  Samaria  that  a  time  was  coming 
when  neither  on  Mount  Gerizim  nor  at  Jerusalem  should  men  wor- 
ship the  Father.  He  does  not  give  as  the  reason,  "  God  is  every- 
where;" but  He  rises  at  once  to  the  higher  level ;  He  says  "  God 
is  a  Spirit,"  and  they  that  worship  Him  must  worship  Him  in  spirit  and 
in  truth.  And  He  connects  with  these  wTords,  what  would  seem  to 
modern  thinkers  the  most  direct  contradiction  of  them  :  "  We  know 
what  we  worship,  for  salvation  is  of  the  Jews."  Unquestionably  such 
language  would  have  been  utterly  inconsistent  with  the  Omnipresent 
doctrine ;  it  was  nowise  inconsistent  with  the  doctrine  "  God  is  a  Spi- 
rit." Every  step  in  the  Jewish  revelation  and  history  had  presumed 
that  truth,  and  had  been  preparing  the  way  for  the  full  manifestation 
of  it.  Every  step  of  it  had  been  more  fully  bringing  out  the  idea  of 
God  as  the  Holy  One,  as  the  Moral  Being,  the  object  of  trust  and 
awe  and  reverence.  And  in  nothing  had  this  idea  been  more  ex- 
pressed, than  in  those  arrangements  which  seemed  to  localize  the 
Divine  Presence.  Because  He  was  the  Holy  One.  He  must  not  be 
worshipped  in  all  the  forms  of  nature  and  visible  things ;  He  must 
be  viewed  as  distinct,  personal ;  He  must  be  approached,  in  the 
temple,  through  the  priest  with  the  sacrifice.  By  all  these  means, 
now  regarded  as  so  sensual,  men  were  taught  that  it  was  not  with 
their  senses  that  they  were  to  apprehend  God  ;  that  it  was  that  in 
them  which  desires  truth  and  holiness  which  must  seek  Him,  which 
by  a  wonderful  method  He  was  drawing  towards  Himself.  And 
therefore,  though  simple  people  who  had  sought  God  without  the 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


325 


law,  might  be  far  better  prepared  to  welcome  Him  who  brought 
their  sins  to  their  mind,  and  told  them  all  things  that  ever  they  did, 
than  the  proud  idolater  of  the  law  could  ever  be;  yet  those  who 
had  profited  by  the  law,  those  who  were  Israelites  indeed,  and 
without  guile,  those  who  had  served  God  day  and  night  in  the 
temple,  and  waited  for  the  consolation  of  Israel,  were  far  better 
prepared  than  any  others  could  be  to  see  the  glory  of  God  in  the 
man  Christ  Jesus ;  to  feel  that  there  was  no  contradiction  in  the 
perfectly  Holy  One  inhabiting  a  body  of  human  clay  ;  that  it  was 
a  low,  carnal,  sensual  notion  of  the  Godhead,  one  which  really 
identified  Him  with  physical  things,  and  therefore  subjected  Him 
practically  to  the  laws  of  space,  which  made  it  seem  to  be  a  con- 
tradiction. 

I  maintain,  then,  that  the  highest,  clearest,  most  spiritual,  most 
universal  idea  of  God  which  any  creature  can  attain  to,  is  not  that 
which  he  receives  from  a  dream  about  the  attribute  of  omnipre- 
sence, but  that  into  which  he  enters  when  he  contemplates  the 
fulness  of  truth  and  holiness  and  love,  the  absolute  and  perfect 
Being  pleasing  to  identify  Himself  with  a  human  soul  and  body,  to 
suffer  with  them,  to  raise  them  out  of  death,  to  raise  them  to  glory. 
We  have  not  here  an  attempt  to  merge  complete  spirituality  and 
distinct  locality — each  of  which  is  demanded  by  man's  reason,  each 
of  which  is  necessary  to  the  other — in  a  wretched  abstraction  called 
ubiquity,  a  notion  vacant  of  all  substance  and  reality,  only  serving 
to  puff  up  the  mind  with  the  vague  consciousness  of  possessing  a 
great  idea,  which  it  really  needs  but  has  missed  altogether.  I  should 
be  scrupulous  about  the  use  of  such  language  as  this,  in  reference 
to  a  phrase  which  is  so  prevalent  among  religious  people,  and  which 
may  therefore  have  some  sacred  associations  connected  with  it,  if  I 
did  not  see  that  it  had  been  the  means  of  perplexing  the  minds  of 
little  children,  of  making  moral  and  Christian  education  almost  im- 
possible, of  introducing  infinite  vagueness  and  weakness  into  our 
pulpit  discourses,  of  preparing  men's  minds  for  a  settled  and  hopeless 
pantheism.  That  it  has  also  been  the  means  of  lowering  and  con- 
founding our  feelings  about  the  Eucharistic  feast,  is  implied  in  all 
its  other  effects.  But  here  it  has  met  with  an  enemy  able  to  cope 
with  it.  The  impression  that  this  sacrament  is  a  reality,  in  spite  of 
all  men's  attempts  to  prove  it  and  make  it  a  fiction,  has  kept  alive 


326 


SIGNS  OF  A 


the  belief  that  the  presence  of  God  is  a  truth  and  not  a  dream ;  and 
that  we  may  enter  into  it  in  a  better  and  truer  way  than  by  fancy- 
ing ourselves  in  it,  when  we  are  only  indulging  pleasant  sensations 
and  high  conceits.* 

But  if  I  maintain  so  strongly  that  it  is  only  with  the  Spirit  that 
we  can  hold  communion  with  a  spiritual  Being,  how  do  I  differ  from 
the  Calvinists,  who  admit  that  there  is  a  presence  in  the  sacra- 
ment to  those  who  believe  ?  I  do  not  think  that  I  differ  from  them 
except  when  they  differ  from  themselves.  I  no  more  suppose  that 
our  spirits  can  perceive  a  spiritual  object  without  faith,  than  that 
our  eyes  can  perceive  a  natural  object  if  they  be  blind.  Faith  is 
as  much  that  exercise  in  which  the  spirit  is  and  lives,  as  sight  is  the 
exercise  in  which  the  eye  is  and  lives.  What  more  does  the  Cal- 
vinist  require  ?  He  requires  that  we  should  suppose  there  is  no 
object  present  unless  there  be  something  which  perceives  it ;  and 
having  got  into  this  contradiction,  the  next  step  is  to  suppose  that 
faith  is  not  a  receptive,  but  a  creative  power  ;  that  it  makes  the  thing 
which  it  believes.  We  have  seen  what  a  tendency  to  this  be- 
lief there  has  been  among  all  Protestants  ;  but  we  have  seen  also  that 
there  were  characteristics  in  the  creed  of  the  Calvinist  which  ought 
especially  to  have  delivered  him  from  it.  His  principle  is  to  refer 
every  thing  to  the  will  of  God,  to  suppose  that  nothing  originates 
with  the  creature.  How  then  has  he  fallen  into  an  hypothesis  ap- 
parently so  foreign  from  his  deepest  convictions  ?  He  has  been 
driven  into  it  by  his  habit  of  resolving  his  belief  of  the  Divine 
Will  into  his  doctrine  of  individual  Election.  He  cannot  suppose 
that  God  has  any  higher  end  in  his  manifestations  than  the  redemp- 
tion and  sanctification  of  particular  men  ;  the  idea,  therefore,  of  the 
God-Manhood,  of  God  manifesting  Himself  in  the  person  of  his 
Son.  shrinks  and  dwindles  into  a  mere  expedient  for  accomplishing 
his  objects  of  mercy  towards  the  favoured  members  of  the  race,  and 
by  necessary  consequence  the  belief  that  He  has  devised  a  means 
whereby  men,  as  members  of  a  body,  may  apprehend  Him  who  is 

*  Mr.  Coleridge  has  expressed  rdl  that  I  have  been  saying  on  this  momentous  subject 
in  these  striking  words  :  "  All  this  comes  from  the  young  men  of  this  day  having  been 
educated  to  understand  thc^Divine  Omnipresence  in  any  sense  rather  thnn  the  alone  safe 
and  legitimate  one,  the  pkesknce  of  all  things  to  God." — Aids  to  Reflection,  p.  398  ; 
and  consider  the  whole  passage  from  p.  388  to  p.  401. 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


327 


the  head  of  the  body,  loses  itself  in  this  strange  attempt  to  conceive 
a  presence  which  is  not  a  presence  till  we  make  it  so.  Still  it  is  a 
curious  and  interesting  fact,  that  the  form  and  principle  of  Calvin's 
doctrine,  as  distinguished  from  his  system,  was  mainly  upheld  by 
his  faith  in  this  sacrament ;  and  that  when  his  followers  approxi- 
mated, as  of  necessity  they  did ;  more  and  more  nearly  to  the 
Zuinglian  doctrine  on  this  supject,  the  system  became  more  and 
more  prominent  and  exclusive. 

It  is  a  great  transition  to  go  from  either  of  these  views  to 
the  Lutheran,  wherein  the  actual  presence  of  Christ  as  the  ground 
of  faith,  and  not  as  grounded  upon  it,  is  so  unequivocally  asserted. 
It  might  seem  that  in  doing  so  I  must  change  the  character  of  my 
statements ;  that  whereas  I  have  hitherto  been  endeavouring  to  assert 
this  presence  against  those  who  deny  it,  I  must  now,  if  I  discover 
any  difference  with  this  class  of  Protestants,  point  out  the  danger 
of  carrying  a  true  principle  to  its  extreme.  But  I  shall  make  no 
such  change,  and  I  see  no  such  danger.  I  complain  of  the  Lutheran, 
as  I  do  of  the  Zuinglian  and  the  Calvinist,  for  seeking  the  deliverance 
of  the  individual  conscience  as  an  ultimate  end ;  and  therefore  for 
failing  to  acknowledge  the  completeness  and  integrity  of  the  bless- 
ing which  Christ  has  bestowed  upon  his  Church.  Whatevealogical 
perplexity  the  Lutheran  has  fallen  into  ;  whatever  violence  he  has 
done  to  the  understanding  by  his  theory  ;  whatever  of  confusion 
he  has  introduced  between  the  sensible  and  the  spiritual  world,  is, 
as  I  conceive,  the  consequence  of  his  not  taking  the  language  of 
our  Lord  and  of  his  Apostles  in  a  sufficiently  plain  and  literal  sense. 
Our  Lord  says,  "  This  is  my  body."  St.  Paul  addresses  the  Ephe- 
sian  converts  as  sitting  in  the  heavenly  places  with  Christ.  He 
tells  the  Philippians  that  their  bodies  shall  be  made  like  unto 
Christ's  glorious  body.  Surely  this  is  Christianity.  It  is  the  Gospel 
of  the  deliverance  of  the  spirit  and  soul  and  body  from  all  the  fet- 
ters by  which  they  are  held  down,  and  prevented  from  fulfilling  each 
its  own  proper  function — from  maintaining  their  right  relations  to 
each  other.  And  this  emancipation  is  connected  with  and  conse- 
quent upon,  our  union,  as  members  of  one  body,  with  Christ,  the 
crucified,  the  risen,  the  glorified  Lord  of  our  race.  Now,  if  these 
be  the  privileges  of  Christian  men,  and  if  these  privileges,  what- 


328 


SIGNS  OF  A 


ever  they  be,  are  in  this  sacrament  asserted  and  realized,  what  a 
low  notion  it  is,  that  we  are  invited  to  hold  communion,  not  with 
Christ  as  He  is,  not  with  his  body  exalted  at  the  right  hand  of 
God,  but  with  a  body  consubstantiated  in  the  elements. 

Think  only  of  the  freedom,  the  fellowship  of  hope — not  only 
compatible  with,  but  inseparable  from,  humiliation  and  fear — im- 
plied in  intercourse  with  the  Prince  and  Forerunner  who  has  actually 
broken  through  the  barriers  of  space  and  time,  whose  body  has 
been  subjected  to  the  events  and  sufferings  of  mortality,  and  who  is 
now  glorified  with  the  glory  which  He  had  with  the  Father  before 
the  worlds  were,  and  hereafter  to  be  manifested  in  the  sight  of 
quick  and  dead.  Bring  these  thoughts  before  you  in  connexion 
with  the  words,  "  This  is  rny  body,"  and  with  the  command  that  we 
should  show  forth  his  death  till  He  come ;  and  then  reflect,  if  you 
can,  upon  the  logical  dogma  of  Consubstantiation,  the  notion  that 
all  these  blessings  do  in  some  way  dwell  in  the  bread  and  wine. 
Surely  what  we  need  is,  that  they  should  be  made  a  perfectly  trans- 
parent medium,  through  which  His  glory  may  be  manifested,  that 
nothing  should  be  really  beheld  by  the  spirit  of  the  worshippers, 
save  He  into  whose  presence  they  are  brought.  For  this  end  the 
element  require  a  solemn  consecration  from  the  priest,  through 
whom  Christ  distributes  them  to  His  flock  ;  not  that  they  may  be 
clothed  with  some  new  and  peculiar  attributes ;  not  that  they  may 
acquire  some  essential  and  miraculous  virtue,  but  that  they  may  be 
diverted  from  their  ordinary  uses,  that  they  may  become  purely 
sacramental.  No  doubt  the  world  is  full  of  sacraments.  Morning 
and  evening,  the  kind  looks  and  parting  words  of  friends,  the  laugh 
of  childhood,  daily  bread,  sickness  and  death ;  all  have  a  holy  sa- 
cramental meaning,  and  should  as  such  be  viewed  by  us.  But 
then  they  have  another  meaning,  which  keeps  this  out  of  sight. 
If  we  would  have  them  translated  to  us,  we  need  some  pure  un- 
troubled element,  which  has  no  significancy,  except  as  the  organ 
through  which  the  voice  of  God  speaks  to  man,  and  through 
which  he  may  answer,  "  Thy  servant  heareth."  Such  we  believe 
are  this  bread  and  wine  when  redeemed  to  his  service :  let  us  not 
deprive  them  of  their  ethereal  whiteness  and  clearness  by  the  colours 
of  our  fancy  or  the  clouds  of  our  intellect. 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


329 


Rat ionalist  ic  0 bjecticm. 
The  philosophical  objections  to  the  Eucharist  in  our  day  will 
generally  take  some  such  form  as  this.    "  The  Christian  mysteries 
are  evidently  a  continuation  and  adaptation  to  new  circumstances  of 
those  which  formed  such  an  important  element  in  Pagan  worship. 
It  would  be  wrong  to  say  of  either,  that  no  meaning  is  involved  in 
them,  that  they  are  merely  the  inventions  of  priestcraft.  Unques- 
tionably the  Samothracian  worship  did  express,  not  only  to  those 
who  took  part  in  it,  but  to  the  Greeks  generally,  something  deep 
and  awful,  something  which  lay  beyond  the  region  of  their  sense 
and  ordinary  experience.    The  priests  availed  themselves  of  the 
feelings  respecting  the  invisible  which  are  so  curiously  wrought 
into  our  being,  sometimes  for  a  good  purpose,  sometimes  for  an  evil 
one.    As  long  as  their  own  faith  lasted,  they  did  much  to  keep 
alive  what  was  good  in  the  minds  of  their  countrymen ;  the  mis- 
chief was,  that  they  continued  to  practise  the  rites  long  after  it  was 
possible  to  attach  any  value  to  them ;  hence  insincerity  in  them- 
selves and  growing  superstition  and  debasement  in  those  who 
looked  up  to  them.    Then  the  old  forms  of  religion  passed  away, 
and  after  an  interval  of  mere  skepticism,  some  new  one,  suitable  to 
the  stage  of  progress  which  the  world  had  reached,  was  of  neces- 
sity introduced ;  this,  of  course,  must  have  its  mysteries.  They 
were  destined  to  pass  through  the  same  process  as  the  others;  first 
honestly  received  as  the  symbols  of  that  which  men's  hearts  and 
consciences  dreamed  of,  then  sinking  into  mere  impostures.  The 
effort  to  speak  of  them  now  as  if  they  had  any  reality  or  signifi- 
cance is  a  deceitful  effort, — in  persons  of  any  intelligence,  a  con- 
sciously deceitful  one ;  in  others,  an  instance  of  the  mad  fanaticism 
which  seeks  to  '  galvanize'  that  which  has  been  long  dead." 

That  there  is  much  plausibility  in  this  statement,  and  that  there 
are  some  undoubted  truths  in  it,  few  will  question.  The  danger  is, 
that  one  set  of  persons  being  shocked  at  the  conclusion,  should  not 
dare  to  ask  themselves  what  the  truths  concealed  in  it  are,  and  should 
therefore  go  away  wilh  an  uncomfortable  sense  of  being  only  half 
honest  in  a  service  which  they  nevertheless  feel  that  they  cannot 
part  with  ;  and  that  another  class,  taking  as  little  pains  to  sift  as- 
sertions which  come  to  them  with  such  an  air  of  evidence  and  wis- 
dom, should  adopt  them  as  the  satisfactory  explanation  of  difficul- 


330 


SIGNS  OF  A 


ties  which  seem  half  historical,  half  personal,  and  which,  if  they 
can  but  be  cleared  out  of  the  history,  may,  it  is  hoped,  cease  to 
perplex  us  in  our  own  lives.  Let  it  then  be  conceded  at  once. 
1.  That  there  is  a  point  of  connexion  between  the  Christian  myste- 
ries and  those  of  the  old  world.  2dly,  That  the  priests  in  the  old 
world  did,  as  it  has  been  said  they  did,  partly  keep  alive  in  the  wor- 
shippers a  sense  of  what  is  true  and  unchangeable,  partly  sanctify 
and  perpetuate  the  transitory  notions  and  degrees  of  knowledge 
which  belonged  to  their  own  or  a  previous  stage  of  civilization. 
3dly,  That  the  priests  in  the  old  world  did,  as  it  is  reported  of  them, 
gradually  become  deceivers  both  of  others  and  themselves.  4thly, 
That  neither  of  these  evil  tendencies  has  been  confined  to  the  hea- 
then world,  but  has  been  manifested  just  as  strongly  in  Christian 
Europe,  and  has  connected  itself  especially  with  the  sacrament  of 
which  we  are  speaking.  5thly,  That  we  are  not,  any  of  us,  free 
from  either  of  these  tendencies  now;  that  we  are  as  liable  to  them, 
and  as  likely  to  fall  into  them,  as  our  forefathers  in  any  age.  6thly, 
That  the  temptation  to  practise  those  galvanic  experiments  upon 
obsolete  customs,  which  have  been  alluded  to,  has  been  strong  at 
all  times,  and  may,  on  some  accounts,  be  particularly  strong  at  this 
time.  All  these  concessions  I  make  without  a  moment's  hesitation, 
and  I  will  now  proceed  to  examine  them  in  detail. 

1st.  It  is  not  pretended  that  the  resemblance  between  the  old 
mysteries  and  the  Christian  mysteries  consists  in  any  similarity  of 
actual  rites  or  practices.  It  lies,  according  to  the  statement  of 
these  philosophers,  in  the  deep  acknowledgment  which  there  has 
been  in  all  ages  of  a  something  which  the  senses  cannot  grapple 
with,  and  which  is  most  awful  and  necessary  for  men.  That  this 
feeling  belongs  to  the  most  permanent  part  of  our  being  ;  that  it 
cannot  satisfy  itself;  that  of  every  faith,  and  every  society,  the 
deepest  principle  must  be  mysterious:  this  is  admitted  by  both 
parties.  Thus  much  is  involved,  and  so  far  as  I  can  see,  no  more 
is  involved,  in  the  assertion,  that  the  mysteries  of  Eleusis  have 
that  which  corresponds  to  them  in  the  Christian  Church. 

2ndly,  The  confusion  in  the  minds  of  the  ancient  priest,  as 
well  as  of  the  ancient  worshippers,  was  of  this  kind.  He  believed 
in  an  awful  Being  above  man,  and  not  cognizable  by  the  senses  ; 
he  believed  in  an  outward  universe  speaking  to  the  senses.  Whe- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


331 


ther  that  Being,  and  this  world,  were  distinct  or  the  same ;  whether 
he  stood  apart  in  his  own  awfulness,  or  was  to  be  seen  in  the  out- 
ward forms,  or  was  to  be  recognised  in  the  hidden  powers  and  life 
of  the  universe;  whether  he  was  nearer  to  man,  according  to  the 
faith  of  the  heroic  ages,  or  to  the  world  in  which  man  dwelt,  were 
the  puzzles  which  nothing  could  solve,  and  which  the  confused 
indefinite  character  of  the  mysteries  well  expressed.  Hence  that 
mixture  of  a  permanent  faith  with  transitory  notions,  which  is  so 
often  referred  to.  The  physical  world  was  an  unknown  unexplored 
world.  Sensible  observations,  which  were,  of  course,  various  in 
every  region,  were  the  groundwork  of  all  the  study  respecting  it ; 
these  observations  were  generalized  into  theories ;  these  theories 
became  parts  of  the  sacerdotal  theology.  Its  nature  was  neces- 
sarily therefore  determined  by  localities,  and  alterable  writh  the 
increase  of  experience.  But  being  grafted  upon  that  which  was 
not  changeable,  it  was  treated  as  if  it  possessed  the  same  sacred- 
ness  ;  and  both  flourished  and  suffered  together.    Hence — 

3dly,  We  are  able  to  explain  the  causes  of  that  insincerity  which 
distinguished  the  later  from  the  earlier  priests.  The  moral  aspects 
of  the  worship ;  the  reverence  for  that  which  the  inner  man  desires ; 
the  affections  and  sympathies  which  can  be  rendered  to  that  which 
is  personal,  and  strictly  speaking  only  to  that — these  were  most 
strong  in  the  infancy  of  nations  :  the  sense  of  the  absolute  and  the 
unapproachable  lay  beneath  these  feelings,  but  was  not  brought 
out  into  distinct  consciousness.  The  physical  notions  which  were 
attached  to  these  acknowledgments  of  moral  relations  were  of  a 
simple  kind,  directly  deduced  from  simple  sensible  observations.  In 
process  of  time,  the  one  set  of  feelings  became  weaker  and  baser  ; 
the  facts  of  the  other  kind,  and  the  inferences  from  them,  were  mul- 
tiplied. The  remnants  of  ancient  faith,  and  still  more  of  ancient 
fear,  became  inextricably  combined  with  these ;  human  desires  and 
sympathies  inseparably  attached  themselves  to,  and  embodied 
themselves  in,  visible  things ;  these  became  the  real  objects  of 
worship  in  spite  of  an  ever  struggling  conviction,  that  they  were 
not  meant  to  be  so,  and  that  the  ceremonies  and  mysteries  which 
had  been  handed  down  were  not  strictly  appropriate  to  them. 
Meantime  the  philosopher  having  enlarged  his  sphere  of  outward 
observation,  having  felt  an  impenetrable  depth,  as  well  as  an  un- 


332  SIGN'S  OF  A 

definable  extent  in  the  world  around  him,  having  detected  incon- 
sistencies in  the  anthropomorphic  notions  of  his  countrymen,  having 
crushed  his  own  human  longings,  and  lost  his  sympathies  with 
individual  men,  begins  to  speak  of  the  world  as  the  one  great 
mystery.  That  which  he  expresses  in  abstract  language,  is  really 
the  habit  of  thought  in.  the  age  generally.  The  priest  secretly 
confesses  that  it  is  his  own  ;  but,  either  from  fear,  from  affection 
and  reverence,  from  an  honest  conviction  that  he  has  something 
which  the  philosopher  has  not,  from  mere  ignorance,  from  all  these 
motives  combined,  or  from  lower  motives  than  any  of  these,  he 
cleaves  to  the  old  forms  and  language,  cleaves  to  them  so  much 
the  more  tenaciously,  because  he  doubts  whether  one  part  of  them 
may  not  be  as  insecure  as  another,  and  therefore  dreads  lest  the 
loss  of  any  part  should  involve  the  loss  of  the  whole.  The  people, 
meanwhile,  are  conscious  of  wants  of  which  the  philosopher  takes 
no  account,  conscious  that  they  are  despised  by  him.  They  have 
no  longer  any  guides  to  that  which  is  higher  and  nobler  than  their 
own  conceits ;  these  must  at  all  hazards  be  gratified  ;  the  priest 
seeks  to  gratify  them,  and  sinks  lower  himself,  while  he  drags  them 
down  in  the  attempt. 

4thly,  It  is  not  difficult  for  any  student  of  modern  history,  in 
both  these  cases,  to  perceive  the  parallel  between  heathendom  and 
Christendom.  If  we  look  at  the  first  ages,  we  see  those  deep 
thoughts  concerning  God,  his  being,  his  unity,  his  relations  to  men, 
which  I  spoke  of  in  a  former  section,  mixing  themselves  with,  and 
sometimes  almost  losing  themselves  in  speculations  about  the  out- 
ward world  and  the  creatures  which  inhabit  it — speculations  derived 
from  no  revealed  authority,  ascertained  by  no  careful  study  and 
experiment,  founded  on  no  satisfactory  data;  for  the  most  part,  the 
result  of  mythological  or  philosophical  traditions.  These  specula- 
tions, however,  could  not  be  separated  by  men  whose  souls  and 
spirits  were  wholly  occupied  with  divine  contemplations  from  that 
which  is  divine.  They  felt  that  God  must  be  the  author  of  the 
outward  world,  that  it  must  be  made  for  his  glory,  that  there  are 
in  it  marvellous  types  of  that  which  is  spiritual.  They  believed, 
moreover,  that  the  visible  and  invisible  had  been  brought  into 
close  and  inseparable  union,  by  the  incarnation  of  the  Son  of  God; 
that  every  part  of  their  own  lives,  and  of  creation,  was  to  be  in- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


333 


formed  by  the  New  Life  which  had  been  manifested  ;  and  they 
could  not  understand  how  they  might  maintain  these  principles, 
and  yet  not  invest  with  a  certain  sanctity  their  own  conceptions  of 
the  universe.  Then  came  the  downfall  of  that  world  under  which 
the  Fathers  lived,  and  the  growth  of  the  new  forms  of  society  in 
Western  Europe.  By  the  merciful  providence  of  God,  a  great 
part  of  the  treasures  of  past  times  was  hidden  from  the  Latin  and 
Teutonic  nations,  that  they  might  not  be  hindered  from  following 
their  own  peculiar  and  appointed  course  of  discipline.  This  disci- 
pline led  them  into  a  class  of  investigations,  upon  which  the  Fathers 
had  only  in  part  entered,  or  which  had  been  entirely  subordinate 
in  their  minds  to  the  higher  theology — investigations  respecting 
the  nature  of  man,  the  laws  and  conditions  under  which  he  is  and 
acts.  Such  inquiries,  pursued  with  earnest  and  holy  feelings,  and, 
as  I  think,  with  the  most  positively  beneficial  results,  as  far  as 
their  own  peculiar  sphere  of  labour  was  concerned,  by  the  school- 
men, led,  however,  to  increased  confusion  in  the  provinces  both  of 
theology  and  physics.  For  both  alike  were  viewed  through  the 
forms  and  colours  of  the  human  intellect ;  the  invisible  relations 
which  the  heart  and  reason  acknowledge,  the  visible  things  which 
the  eye  perceives,  were  alike  subjected  to  our  conceptions  and 
theories,  and  treated  as  inseparable  from  them.  In  the  sacrament 
of  which  we  are  speaking,  the  results  were  so  striking  as  to  be  a 
clew  to  those  which  meet  us  in  every  other  direction.  In  the  age 
of  the  Fathers  there  might  have  been  a  frequent  blending  of  phy- 
sical with  spiritual  language ;  not  in  general  arising  from  any 
unbelief  in  the  distinct  reality  and  substantiality  of  that  which  is 
unseen,  but  rather  from  a  desire  to  invest  the  outward  universe 
with  a  portion  of  its  glory.  But  in  the  middle  age  all  these  ex- 
pressions must  be  stiffened  into  a  theory ;  logic  must  inseparably 
incorporate  the  theological  idea  with  the  physical  notion,  and  must 
itself  claim  dominion  over  both.  And  then  it  signified  not  how 
much  the  understanding  recoiled  at  its  own  invention  ;  the  dogma 
was  established,  the  sacrament  meant  transubstantiation,  and  those 
who  admitted  the  institution  to  be  sacred,  must  at  all  hazards  re- 
ceive the  opinion. 

5thly,  Such  being  the  state  of  things  it  is  not  wonderful,  that 
for  a  time  faith  in  the  sacrament,  as  a  witness  of  a  real  commu- 

22 


334 


SlGiNS  OF  A 


nion  between  man  and  his  Maker,  should  be  able  to  uphold  the 
notion  which  was  appended  to  it ;  that  in  a  later  time  the  extra- 
vagance of  the  notion  should  have  served  to  destroy  a  faith  already 
from  other  causes  waxing  weak ;  that  the  priests  should  have 
made  desperate  efforts  to  keep  both  alive  together ;  that  in  doing 
so  they  should  have  resorted  to  arguments  which  made  the  evil 
part  of  their  scheme  yet  stronger,  and  obscured  still  more  its  purer 
element ;  that  the  effect  upon  their  own  minds,  and  the  minds  of 
their  flocks,  should  have  been  a  still  increasing  insincerity.  Nor 
must  we  suppose  that  these  sad  effects  were  stopped  by  the  Refor- 
mation, or  that  after  the  Reformation  they  were  confined  to  those 
who  remained  in  communion  with  Rome.    Every  great  shaking 
must  bring  out  that  which  is  true  and  sound  in  men's  hearts,  and 
make  the  untruth  in  those  who  have  willingly  yielded  to  it  more 
palpable  as  well  as  more  actually  dominant.    The  first  effect,  I 
make  no  doubt,  took  place  in  the  hearts  of  many  Romanists.  They 
were  thrown  back  upon  their  higher  moral  principles ;  these  they 
thought  were  invaded  by  the  new  doctrines ;  these  could  not  be 
sacrificed  on  account  of  any  intellectual  puzzles  and  contradictions. 
On  the  other  hand,  a  more  conscious  and  direct  identification  of 
the  formula  with  the  principle  must  have  been  the  consequence  of 
the  decrees  of  the  Council  of  Trent  upon  those  who  yielded  to  them, 
and  a  disposition  to  invent  some  antagonist  formula  would  have 
been  excited  by  the  same  cause  in  the  reformed  bodies.  While  the 
controversies  which  these  attempts  awrakened  were  proceeding  in 
the  religious  circles,  men  in  general  became  occupied  with  that 
new  class  of  thoughts  to  which  I  alluded  in  my  first  part.  The 
principle  upon  which  the  outwTard  world  had  been  hitherto  investi- 
gated was  shown  to  be  impracticable  ;  men  were  taught  how  they 
might  study  it  in  itself,  without  imputing  to  it  their  own  concep- 
tions ;  the  new  method  wras  rewarded  with  the  most  signal  disco- 
veries ;  gradually,  as  I  observed,  a  pursuit  which  had  produced, 
and  which  promised  such  grand  results,  took  the  place  of  every 
other.    This  alone  was  supposed  to  be  founded  upon  any  sure  data  ; 
if  there  were  any  other  religion,  it  could  only  be  examined  accord- 
ing to  these  data.    Of  course  all  the  physical  mixtures  which  had 
intruded  themselves  into  theology,  were  scornfully  rejected  ;  this 
was  the  first  step.    The  next  was  a  disbelief  in  those  forms  and 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


335 


conceptions  of  the  mind  itself,  which  had  so  much  darkened  the 
face  of  nature.  And  since  the  Romanist  theology  was  inseparably 
interwoven  with  both  physics  and  logic  ;  the  Reformation  theolo- 
gy not  much  with  physics  but  even  more  with  the  forms  of  the  un- 
derstanding ;  there  grew  up  an  almost  unavoidable  suspicion  of 
both.  And  this  suspicion  might  only  have  been  profitable,  as  in 
the  end  I  trust  it  will  prove,  if  along  with  it  there  had  not  arisen 
that  entire  disbelief  in  spiritual  realities,  of  which  moral  corruption 
was  the  primary,  the  pride  of  physical  speculation  only  the  secon- 
dary, cause.  This  incredulity  found  its  way  into  the  hearts  of  the 
priests  of  both  communions.  In  some  it  had  the  effect  of  inducing 
a  general  latitudinarianism,  a  willingness  to  abandon  all  ancient 
forms,  a  tolerance  of  all  kinds  of  language,  because  there  seemed 
to  be  no  truth  to  which  any  of  them  was  pointing.  In  others  it  oc- 
casioned a  pertinacious  clinging  to  every  thing  which  had  been, 
through  old  tradition  or  modern  innovation,  identified  with  theolo- 
gical principles.  The  root  of  these  evils  was  the  same  in  the  third 
age  as  in  the  first.  God  and  the  world  were  confounded.  That 
which  the  spirit  of  man  demands  for  its  satisfaction,  that  which  hu- 
manity seeks  after  as  its  object,  was  identified  with  the  visible 
things  over  which  the  spirit  is  meant  to  rule,  in  which  humanity  is 
meant  to  see  the  image  of  those  realities  that  surpass  it.  Hence 
the  mysteries  of  Christianity,  which  the  first  age  had  sought  to 
connect  with  misunderstood  terrestrial  things  for  the  sake  of  glori- 
fying them,  which  the  second  age  had  connected  with  those  forms 
and  conceptions  of  our  own  minds,  wherein  physical  things  had 
been  hitherto  contemplated,  were  in  the  third  age  described  as  ut- 
terly unmeaning  by  the  wise  and  prudent,  who  had  learnt  the  right 
method  of  studying  nature  and  the  impositions  which  the  mind 
practises  upon  itself, — were  held  fast  with  a  loving  but  trembling 
faith  by  the  poor  and  the  childlike,  who,  amidst  all  perplexities  will 
not  forsake  that  which  their  hearts  tell  them  that  they  need. 

6thly,  I  have  traced  then  the  causes  and  the  progress  of  the 
confusion  which  is  common  to  the  history  of  the  pagan  and  the 
Christian  world.  And  now  the  question  occurs,  who  are  likely  to 
fall  into  this  confusion  in  our  day,  and  by  what  means  is  it  to  beavoid- 
ed  ?  I  by  no  means  deny  that  we,  the  priests  of  theChristian  coven- 
ant are  in  danger  of  falling  into  it.  We  hear  many  denials  all  around 


336 


SIGNS  OF  A 


us;  we  are  told  that  things  are  obsolete,  which  we  feel  were  never 
so  much  needed  as  now ;  we  are  informed  that  what  is  objective, 
is  nothing  worth,  and  we  find  from  the  history  of  the  world  that, 
the  subjective  notions  and  fancies  of  men  have  brought  all  kinds  of 
perplexities  into  it.  We  observe  a  continual  inclination  to  reject 
that  which  seems  to  us  solid  and  precious,  and  we  are  threatened 
that  this  inclination  is  to  increase  indefinitely.  What  so  natural  as 
that  we  should  throw  ourselves  back  upon  the  past,  that  we  should 
pledge  ourselves  to  what  we  think  a  determined  resistance  to  the 
spirit  of  the  age — not  only  seeking  to  retain  what  we  have,  but  to 
recover  what  we  have  lost ;  that  we  should  number  among  our 
losses  the  apprehensions  respecting  the  physical  world,  which  be- 
long to  the  infancy  of  society,  the  logical  systems  which  grew  up 
in  its  boyhood ;  and  that  we  should  think  the  effort  to  regain  these 
a  proof  of  our  reverence  for  God's  sacraments,  an  acknowledg- 
ment of  their  permanent  and  real  character  ?  Such  feelings,  I  say, 
are  most  natural,  and  just  so  far  as  we  yield  to  them  we  shall  un- 
questionably try  to  galvanize  the  habits  and  notions  of  a  foregone 
period. 

But  why  should  we  not  yield  to  them  1  I  answer,  Because  in 
doing  so  we  show  that  we  are  not  free  from  the  spirit  of  the  age, 
but  are  infected  by  it;  because  in  doing  so,  we  show  that  we  are 
not  impressed  with  the  permanence  and  reality  of  God's  sacraments, 
but  have  yielded  to  the  prevailing  skepticism  respecting  them.  For 
what  is  the  spirit  of  the  age,  as  it  exhibits  itself  in  those  philoso- 
phers whose  objections  we  are  now  considering  ?  I  have  endea- 
voured, in  a  former  part  of  this  work,  to  show  that  no  persons  are 
so  disposed  as  they  are  to  confound  God  with  the  world, — to  look 
at  this  visible  universe,  with  its  mysterious  powers  and  properties, 
as  the  real  Being,  or  at  least  as  the  greatest  manifestation  of  the 
real  Being.  This  pantheistic  tendency  is  especially  our  tendency 
at  this  time  ;  and  this  has  been  in  all  past  times  the  source  of  that 
confusion  between  the  permanent  and  the  transitory,  the  essential 
and  the  accidental,  which  we  are  told,  and  rightly  told,  to  beware 
of.  And  therefore  Christian  priests  will  not  be  the  only  galvani- 
zers.  It  is  to  the  philosophers  of  the  age  following  the  promul- 
gation of  Christianity,  to  Plotinus  and  Porphyry,  and  Jarablichus, 
that  we  are  indebted  for  the  most  remarkable  galvanic  experi- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


337 


ments  on  record.  They  tried  to  reproduce  the  old  Pagan  forms,  ex- 
pressly as  a  means  of  giving  a  body  to  their  philosophy,  which 
otherwise  they  felt  that  it  had  not,  and  as  a  means  of  resisting  the 
progress  of  the  new  kingdom.  There  are  symptoms  of  the  same 
inclination  among  us  now.  We  shall  see  more  and  more  of  them. 
Pantheism  never  has  existed,  and  never  will  exist,  in  that  naked 
essential  character  which  it  affects.  It  will  beget  idolatries,  and 
since  the  imagination  of  man  has  well  nigh  exhausted  itself  in  that 
kind  of  production,  these  idolatries  will  not  be  new,  but  old.  How 
may  they  be  withstood  ?  I  believe  in  no  way  so  effectually  as  by 
the  simple  putting  forth  of  this  Sacrament,  not  clothed  with  a 
number  of  fantastic  rites  and  emblems,  but  in  its  own  dreadful 
grandeur,  as  the  bond  of  a  communion  between  heaven  and  earth, 
— as  a  witness  that  man  is  not  a  creature  of  this  world,  but  has  his 
home,  his  citizenship  in  another, — as  a  witness  that  his  spirit  is  not 
the  function  or  creature  of  his  body,  and  has  not  therefore  need  to 
make  out  its  enjoyments  from  the  things  which  the  eye  sees,  and 
the  ear  hears ;  but  that  his  body  is  the  attendant  and  minister  of 
his  spirit,  is  to  be  exalted  by  it,  is  to  bring  all  visible  things  under 
it, — as  a  witness  that  the  Son  of  man  is  set  down  at  the  right 
hand  of  the  Throne  of  God,  and  that  those  who  believe  in  Him, 
and  suffer  with  Him,  are  meant  to  live  and  reign  with  Him  there. 
The  forms  of  nature,  the  forms  of  the  understanding,  have  striven 
to  reduce  this  sacrament  to  their  own  level ;  it  remains  as  a  mighty 
power  in  God's  hands,  to  raise  man  above  these  forms,  into  com- 
munion with  himself. 

THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 

After  the  remarks  under  the  last  head,  it  may  seem  scarcely 
needful  that  I  should  vindicate  my  statements  respecting  this  sacra- 
ment from  the  charge  of  Romanism ;  but  since  I  have  maintained 
that  the  character  of  the  Eucharistic  feast  is  sacrificial,  that  Christ 
is  really  present  in  it,  and  that  the  words  of  institution  are  to  be 
taken  literally  ;  since  it  is  very  evidently  implied  in  what  I  have 
said,  that  a  certain  order  of  persons  first  received  the  sacramental 
elements,  and  that  a  certain  order  ought  to  administer  them  now : 
it  may  be  advisable  to  show,  even  at  the  risk  of  some  repetition, 
wherein  I  am  opposed  to  the  Romish  theory  upon  each  of  these 
points. 


338 


SIGNS  OF  A 


h  I  need  only  ask  the  reader  to  compare  the  observations 
which  were  made  respecting  the  difference  between  the  Catholic 
and  the  Romish  idea  of  Baptism,  and  the  Catholic  and  Romish 
forms  of  worship,  with  those  which  have  been  made  in  this  section 
respecting  the  question  of  sacrifice  ;  in  order  that  he  may  perceive 
the  principle  which  governs  all  three  cases.  I  complained  that 
the  baptized  man,  according  to  the  Romish  theory,  only  receives  a 
momentary  gift,  and  is  not  admitted  into  a  permanent  state;  that 
the  worshipper,  according  to  the  Romish  notion,  is  purchasing 
some  future  benefit  by  his  acts  of  devotion,  not  claiming  a  blessing 
which  has  been  already  purchased  for  him.  It  is  impossible  that 
he  should  not  act  in  strict  conformity  to  these  maxims,  when  he  is 
dealing  with  the  sacrifice  which  is  the  foundation  of  the  Christian's 
state,  and  the  consummation  of  the  Christian's  worship.  The 
Eucharistic  sacrifice  is  of  course  regarded  by  him  as  the  means  of 
obtaining  those  advantages  and  blessings  which  Christ's  sacrifice 
has  not  fully  procured  for  us,  or  which  we  through  our  sins  and 
negligence  have  lost.  Such,  I  need  hardly  say,  is  the  view  com- 
monly presented  of  it  by  Romish  writers,  and  such  is  the  view 
against  which  all  the  attacks  of  the  Reformers  were  directed  ; 
consequently  the  doctrine  which  I  have  put  forward,  that  this  feast 
derives  its  peculiarity,  deriv  es  its  sacrificial  character,  from  the  fact 
that  a  complete  sacrifice  has  been  offered  up  for  man,  is  far  more 
formally  and  practically  opposed  to  Romanism  than  that  which  is 
prevalent  in  our  day.  There  is  no  formal  opposition  between  the 
doctrine  which  denies  the  very  existence  of  a  Eucharistic  sacrifice, 
and  that  which  affirms  it  to  be  the  carrying  out  of  an  incomplete 
sacrifice  made  for  us  by  Christ.  The  two  opinions  contradict  each 
other,  but  they  cannot  be  brought  into  comparison ;  each  is  con- 
tinually gaining  strength  from  the  denial  which  is  contained  in  the 
other ;  but  what  each  asserts,  or  to  what  test  they  can  be  brought, 
the  supporters  of  them  are  constantly  puzzled  to  discover.  Neither 
is  there  a  practical  opposition,  for  the  Protestants  are  constantly 
losing  sight  of  the  finished  sacrifice  of  Christ,  in  their  anxiety  to 
assert  the  importance  of  human  faith  ;  and  the  Romanists  are  con- 
stantly trying,  through  a  violent  effort  of  recollection,  assisted  by 
visible  images  and  presentations,  to  bring  back  the  very  event  of 
our  Lord's  crucifixion,  and  all  the  circumstances  attending  it;  so 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


339 


that  there  is  an  unconscious  confession  on  the  part  of  the  one,  that 
there  must  be  acts  of  ours  in  which  the  blessing  of  the  sacrifice  is 
realized  ;  on  the  part  of  the  other,  that  it  is  that  one  sacrifice,  and 
not  any  repetition  of  it  by  us,  in  which  all  virtue  dwells.  I  main- 
tain that  the  sacrament  being  acknowledged  as  the  sacrificial  feast 
of  the  new  dispensation,  realizes  and  harmonizes  these  two  truths, 
satisfies  the  meaning  which  the  Romanist  feels  that  he  cannot  part 
with,  and  so  enables  him  to  cast  aside,  as  degrading,  dangerous, 
and  antichristian,  that  doctrine  which  has  been  one  of  the  greatest 
barriers  between  him  and  his  Protestant  brethren. 

2.  To  the  same  habit  of  mind  which  introduced  this  view  of  the 
Eucharistic  sacrifice,  we  must  attribute  the  entertainment  which 
was  given  by  the  Church,  after  some  hard  struggles,  to  the  doctrine 
respecting  the  transubstantiation  of  the  elements.  I  have  discov- 
ered the  intellectual  origin  of  this  dogma  in  the  scholastic  philoso- 
phy ;  but  that  philosophy  could  never  have  given  it  currency,  if 
there  had  not  been  a  moral  predisposition  in  men's  minds  to  receive 
it.  The  cry  for  some  signal  proof  of  condescension  to  our  low 
estate,  the  sense  of  a  weakness  which  could  only  be  met  by  a 
mighty  act  of  divine  humiliation, — these  feelings  characterized  the 
middle  ages,  and  constituted  their  strength.  The  belief  that  by 
these  acts  the  spirit  of  man  was  to  be  raised  out  of  its  grave  of 
sense,  was  to  be  made  capable  of  actual  communion  with  the 
invisible  and  the  absolute;  this  belief  hovered  about  many  minds, 
was  conveyed  in  many  emblems  and  enigmas,  was  actually  grasp- 
ed by  some  earnest  and  thoughtful  men,  but  never  really  entered 
into  the  practical  life  of  the  period.  To  show  forth  acts  of  bravery, 
condescension,  sacrifice,  and  so  to  glorify  God,  was  the  desire  of  a 
number ;  to  inspire  others  with  the  same  ambition,  the  aim  of  a 
few.  But  everywhere  one  may  trace  the  wish  to  see  the  likeness 
of  God  in  visible  things,  and  under  earthly  conditions,  rather  than 
the  craving  to  see  Him  as  He  is.  I  have  no  need  to  inquire  how 
far  good  or  evil  preponderated  in  this  temper  of  mind.  That  it 
was  a  very  imperfect  one,  most  will  be  ready  to  acknowledge ; 
and  that  its  imperfection  laid  it  open  to  invasions  of  gross  sensual- 
ity, is  only  questioned  by  resolutely  one-sided  or  one-eyed  inquirers. 
In  such  a  state  of  mind  it  was  impossible  that  the  thought  of  com- 
munion with  Christ  where  He  is,  should  be  as  distinctly  presented 


340 


SIGNS  OF  A 


to  the  best  men  in  their  best  moments,  as  it  may  now  be  presented 
to  indifferent  men  who  may  very  little  realize  their  own  vision. 
The  discovery,  therefore,  of  a  substitute  for  this  faith,  of  a  way  in 
which  Christ  might  be  believed  to  be  present  by  a  fresh  act  of 
descent  and  condescension  into  the  circumstances  of  human  nature, 
was  naturally  and  eagerly  welcomed — the  obstacles  which  the 
understanding  opposed  to  the  opinion  readily  swept  away.  What 
sensuality  and  death  grew  out  of  this  notion,  were  fostered  by  it, 
and  helped  to  keep  it  alive ;  what  profaneness  mingled  in  the 
speculations  to  which  it  gave  rise,  how  it  connected  itself  with 
every  other  shape  of  idolatry,  I  think  all  ecclesiastical  history  de- 
monstrates. But  I  have  no  belief  that  the  demonstration  will  be 
heeded,  that  facts  will  not  be  perverted  and  explained  away,  that 
the  natural  results  of  a  system  will  not  be  treated  as  if  they  might 
be  condemned  without  any  reference  to  the  system  itself,  unless 
men  be  led  to  perceive  that  there  is  a  spiritual  truth  which  this 
doctrine  has  been  counterfeiting  and  keeping  out  of  sight,  and  to 
which  it  is  in  far  more  direct  antipathy  than  it  ever  can  be  to  the 
different  Protestant  and  infidel  notions  which  have  been  set  up 
against  it. 

3.  It  is  evident  from  these  remarks,  and  from  all  which  1  have 
said  in  this  section,  that  I  do  not  seek  to  get  rid  of  the  papal  no- 
tion respecting  a  real  presence,  merely  by  saying  that  what  is  spi- 
ritual is  also  most  real.  I  do  indeed  look  upon  that  proposition  as 
nearly  the  most  important  one  which  a  theological  student  can 
think  of  or  remember,  and  also  as  the  one  which  Romanism  is  most 
habitually  denying.  But  I  have  maintained,  that  in  order  to  the 
full  acknowledgment  of  Christ's  spiritual  presence,  we  must  dis- 
tinctly acknowledge  that  He  is  clothed  with  a  body  ;  that  if  wre 
lose  this  belief,  we  adopt  a  vague  pantheistic  notion  of  a  presence 
hovering  about  us  somewhere  in  the  air,  in  place  of  a  clear  spiritual 
apprehension  of  a  Person  in  wrhom  all  truth  and  love  dwell;  that 
the  spiritual  organ  therefore  does  demand  an  actual  body  for  its 
nourishment ;  that  through  that  spiritual  organ  our  bodies  them- 
selves are  meant  to  be  purified  and  glorified;  that  this  sacrament 
meets  and  satisfies  the  needs  both  of  the  human  spirit  which  is  re- 
deemed, and  of  the  body  which  is  waiting  for  its  redemption.  But 
all  these  admissions  only  bring  out  the  difference  with  the  Roman- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


341 


ist  into  stronger  relief.  To  enter  into  fellowship  with  Christ  as  He 
is,  ascended  at  the  right  hand  of  God,  in  a  body  of  glory  and  not  of 
humiliation,  this  must  be  the  desire  of  a  Christian  man,  if  he  seek 
the  presence  of  a  real,  not  an  imaginary  object,  if  he  desire  his  body 
as  well  as  his  spirit  to  be  raised  and  exalted.  On  this  ground  then  he 
must  reject  all  theories  which  involve  the  imagination  of  a  descent 
into  the  elements  ;  on  this  ground,  also,  he  must  feel  that  the  intel- 
lectual contradiction  which  such  theories  contain,  and  even  boast 
of,  is  the  counterpart  of  a  spiritual  contradiction  still  more  gross 
and  dangerous. 

4.  I  must  say  a  few  words  before  I  conclude  upon  the  differ- 
ence between  my  views  and  those  of  the  Romanists,  respecting 
those  who  administer  this  sacrament.  The  pure  Protestant  express- 
es his  differences  in  such  words  as  these.  The  Romanist,  he  says, 
unhappily  connecting  the  idea  of  sacrifice  with  the  Eucharist,  ne- 
cessarily supposes  that  the  Christian  Church  must  have  its  priests 
as  well  as  the  Jewish ;  we  rejecting  the  first  idea,  of  course  reject 
the  second.  Now  as  I  have  so  carefully  connected  the  idea  of  sa- 
crifice with  the  Eucharist,  it  follows  from  this  statement,  that  if  I 
suppose  it  to  be  administered  by  human  hands  at  all,  I  must  sup- 
pose those  hands  to  be,  in  some  sense  of  the  word,  sacerdotal.  Nay, 
it  would  seem  to  follow  by  almost  necessary  inference,  that  if  I  sup- 
pose the  Jewish  sacrifice  to  have  passed  into  something  higher,  I 
must  suppose  the  Jewish  priesthood  to  have  passed  into  something 
higher.  And  this  in  fact  is  my  belief.  I  do  think  a  Melchisedec 
priesthood  has  succeeded  to  an  Aaronical  priesthood,  even  as  the 
power  of  an  endless  life  has  succeeded  to  the  law  of  a  carnal  com- 
mandment. I  do  think  that  he  who  presents  the  perfect  sacrifice 
before  God,  and  himself  and  his  people  as  redeemed  by  that  sacri- 
fice, has  a  higher  function  than  he  had  who  presented  the  daily  of- 
fering, or  made  the  yearly  atonement  before  God.  I  do  think  he 
who  is  permitted  to  feed  the  people  with  this  bread  and  wine  has  a 
higher  work  to  do  than  he  who  came  out  of  the  holy  place  to  bless 
the  people  in  God's  name.  And  I  complain  of  the  Romanists  for 
lowering  this  office,  for  depriving  it  of  its  spiritual  and  Catholic 
character,  for  reducing  it  to  the  level  or  below  the  level  of  that 
which  existed  before  the  incarnation.  No  honour  which  is  put 
upon  the  person  of  the  priest  can  make  amends  to  him  for  the  de- 


342 


SIGNS  OF  A 


gradation  which  he  suffers  by  being  treated  as  if  he  were  without 
the  veil,  pleading  for  admission  into  the  presence  of  God,  not  claim- 
ing the  privilege  for  himself  and  his  people  of  being  admitted  into 
it.  No  emblems  which  exhibit  his  own  mysterious  glory  and  beau- 
ty can  be  any  compensation  for  the  loss  of  the  belief  that  he  is  per- 
mitted with  open  face  to  behold  the  glory  of  his  Lord.  Above  all, 
the  differences  which  are  made  between  him  and  his  flock,  espe- 
cially that  most  gross  and  offensive  one,  by  whatever  arguments  it 
may  be  palliated,  of  permitting  him  alone  to  receive  the  sacramen- 
tal wine,  do  but  show  that  he  is  not  like  his  Lord,  that  he  is  not 
one  of  many  brethren,  but  has  only  the  melancholy  delight  of  fan- 
cying that  there  are  blessings  reserved  for  him  in  which  other  men 
are  not  sharers.  Herein  he  is  far  below  the  Jew.  The  high-priest 
believed  that  he  was  one  of  a  kingdom  of  priests  ;  that  he  received 
his  garments  of  beauty  and  his  holy  mitre  because  he  was  their  re- 
presentative. A  Jew  would  have  answered  to  the  complaint  of 
Korah,  "  Ye  take  too  much  upon  you,  seeing  that  all  the  congre- 
gation are  holy,  every  one  of  them."  *  We  take  this  upon  us 
which  has  been  put  upon  us,  because  the  congregation  is  holy,  and 
because  it  would  not  be  holy  if  we  were  not  consecrated  to  be  wit- 
nesses and  preservers  of  its  holiness.'  A  Jew  could  see  that  the 
oil  upon  Aaron's  head  went  down  to  the  skirts  of  his  garments.  It 
is  not  surely  for  Christians  and  Catholics  to  set  up  an  office  in  the 
Church  against  the  Church  itself,  to  set  at  nought  the  ascription 
which  they  are  appointed  to  offer  up  in  the  name  of  the  whole  body  : 
"Unto  him  that  loved  us  and  washed  us  from  our  sins  in  his  own 
blood,  and  hath  made  us  kings  and  priests  unto  God  and  his  Fa- 
ther ;  to  him  be  glory  and  dominion  for  ever  and  for  ever."  But 
I  am  intruding  upon  the  subject  of  the  next  section. 


SECTION  V. 

THE  MINISTRY. 

It  is  commonly  observed,  that  the  sacerdotal  caste  has  three  in- 
variable characteristics.  It  assumes  a  lofty  dominion  over  the  minds 
as  well  as  the  bodies  of  men,  it  imposes  a  very  heavy  yoke  upon 
both,  it  is  opposed  to  every  thing  humane  and  expansive. 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


343 


How  much  warrant  there  is  for  these  accusations,  every  one 
who  reads  history  must  perceive.  And  assuredly  these  evil  ten- 
dencies have  not  been  confined  to  one  set  of  circumstances  or  one 
form  of  religion ;  they  have  manifested  themselves  in  Judea  and 
Christendom  as  well  as  in  Hindostan.  They  may  therefore  be  fairly 
considered  as  belonging  to  human  nature,  and  as  being  especially 
likely  to  assail  any  one  who  anywhere  and  under  any  conditions, 
assumes  the  office  of  a  religious  guide  and  authority. 

That  this  institution  has  not  been  merely  fruitful  of  evil,  the  im- 
partial inquirer,  especially  in  the  most  modern  times,  is  ready  to 
acknowledge.  But  he  rightly  observes,  that  we  must  not  restrict 
the  advantages  it  has  produced  to  any  particular  system.  Much 
has  been  done  for  civilization  by  Memphis,  and  Delphi,  and  by  the 
Brahmins  of  the  East.  And  it  remains,  he  says,  to  be  proved,  that 
the  idea  of  the  priesthood  does  not  involve  tyranny  and  narrowness, 
though  at  certain  periods  the  tyranny  may  have  been  useful,  the 
narrowness  common  to  all  classes. 

Undoubtedly  this  is  the  real  question.  If  we  should  find  upon 
inquiry  that  the  fundamental  principles  of  a  sacerdotal  caste,  amidst 
all  its  outward  varieties,  are  those  we  have  just  set  down,  it  ought 
to  be  got  rid  of  as  soon  as  possible  ;  and  it  will  disappear  as  soon 
as  truth  and  honesty  have  gained  the  victory,  which  we  at  least  are 
bound  to  believe  they  will  ultimately  gain,  over  fraud  and  falsehood. 
If  on  the  other  hand  it  should  be  found  that  an  idea  of  the  priest- 
hood, curiously  and  exactly  opposite  to  that  which  presumes  domin- 
ion, restraint  upon  the  human  spirit,  confinement  of  men  within  cer- 
tain districts  and  habits  of  thought,  to  be  its  objects,  is  embodied  in 
the  forms  and  language  of  the  Christian  Church,  we  may  perhaps 
ask  ourselves  whether  this  may  not  be  the  idea  after  which  men  in 
all  ages  and  in  all  religions  have  been  feeling  ;  whether  the  good 
which  is  attributed  to  them  have  not  been  the  consequence  of  their 
attaining  to  some  apprehension  of  it,  the  evil  they  have  done,  the 
consequence  of  their  losing  sight  of  it  or  contradicting  it ;  whether 
therefore  the  triumph  of  truth  over  falsehood  may  not  be  exhibited 
in  the  full  accomplishment  of  this  idea,  not  in  the  destruction  of  the 
institution  which  has  witnessed  for  it  and  preserved  it. 

Now  these  facts  are  indisputable.  1.  The  whole  sacerdotal 
caste  in  Christendom  has  the  name  of  ministers  or  servants. 


344  SIGN'S  OF  A 

From  the  Bishop  of  Rome  down  to  the  founder  of  the  last  new  sect 
in  the  United  States  of  America,  every  one  who  deals  with  the 
Gospel  at  all,  or  pretends  in  any  sense  to  have  a  divine  commis- 
sion, assumes  this  name  as  the  description  of  his  office.  2.  The 
most  remarkable  power  which  these  ministers  have  claimed,  and 
that  on  account  of  which  the  greatest  homage  has  been  paid  to 
them,  is  the  power  of  absolving  or  setting  free.  This  claim  has 
iu  a  manner  been  universal.  Luther  believed  that  he  was  to  ab- 
solve as  much  as  Tetzel.  Every  person  who  says  that  the  sole 
office  of  a  minister  is  to  preach  the  Gospel,  says  so  because  he  be- 
lieves this  is  the  way  to  absolve.  There  are  most  serious  differ- 
ences about  the  nature  of  the  power  and  the  mode  in  which  it  is  to 
be  exercised,  none  at  all  about  the  existence  of  it,  and  about  its 
connexion  in  some  way  or  other  with  the  Christian  ministry. 
3.  The  third  fact  is  this.  In  Christian  Europe,  ever  since  it  be- 
came Christian,  the  most  conspicuous  order  of  ministers  has  been 
one  which  assumed  to  itself  an  universal  character.  The  overseers 
or  Bishops  of  the  Christian  Church  have  felt  themselves  to  be  em- 
phatically the  bonds  of  communication  between  different  parts  of 
the  earth.  The  jurisdiction  of  each  has  been  confined  within  a 
certain  district;  but,  by  the  very  nature  of  their  office,  they  have 
held  fellowship,  and  been  obliged  to  hold  fellowship,  with  those 
who  lived  in  other  districts,  who.  spoke  different  languages,  who 
were  bound  together  by  different  notions  and  customs.  Now  though 
such  an  order  may  be  very  far  more  dangerous,  and  may  have 
been  felt  by  the  rulers  of  particular  countries  to  be  far  more  dan- 
gerous than  that  kind  of  priesthood  which  confines  itself  within  a 
particular  region,  yet  it  is  evidently  of  an  entirely  different  kind. 
Whatever  this  institution  may  have  effected,  it  seems  to  aim  at 
establishing  a  more  extended  commerce  and  fellowship  among 
men.  Looking  at  it  superficially,  one  would  say  that  this  ecclesi- 
astical order  imported  something  nnre  comprehensive,  more  dif- 
fusive, than  any  civil  order  which  one  can  think  of,  unless  it  should 
be  some  one  which  attempts  universal  conquest,  and  destroys  its 
character  as  an  order  by  the  attempt.  And  yet  this  episcopacy 
has  not  been  merely  an  accidental  addition  to,  or  overgrowth  upon 
other  forms  of  piiesthood.  In  those  countries  where  it  is  recog- 
nised, it  has  been  the  root  of  all  other  forms,  and  has  been  sup- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


345 


posed  to  contain  them  within  it.  It  has  been  believed,  as  a  neces- 
sary consequence  of  the  importance  attached  to  the  Eucharist,  that 
an  order  of  men  must  exist  in  the  Christian  Church  corresponding 
to  the  priests  of  the  oh!  dispensation,  with  the  difference  that  the 
sacrifice  in  the  one  case  was  anticipatory,  in  the  other  commemo- 
rative. This  office  has  been  associated  with  that  absolving  power 
of  which  I  spoke  just  now.  Yet  it  has  been  always  supposed  to 
be  included  in  that  of  the  Bishop ;  and  where  it  is  assigned  to  a 
distinct  class  of  persons,  that  class  receives  its  authority  from  him. 
In  like  manner  there  has  been  acknowledged  in  the  Church  an 
order  whose  functions  are  evidently  distinct  from  either  of  these  ; 
whose  main  object  is  to  provide  for  the  bodily  wants  of  men,  or 
only  to  announce  to  them  spiritual  truths.  Yet  even  this  office 
has  been  understood  to  be  only  a  delegation  of  certain  powers  in- 
hering in  the  Bishop,  which  he  has  not  leisure  to  discharge,  and  no 
person  can  undertake  it,  in  the  countries  which  recognise  episco- 
pacy, without  such  a  delegation.  So  that  an  office  implying  an 
intention  so  very  remote  from  that  which  the  word  priest  ordinarily 
suggests  to  us,  would  seem  to  have  been  the  characteristic  one  in 
the  Christian  Church,  that  which  includes  all  others,  and  out  of 
which  they  arise. 

But  I  have  used  the  phrase,  "  the  countries  in  which  episcopacy 
is  recognised."  It  is  important,  that  we  should  consider  what 
these  countries  are,  lest  we  should  be  drawing  an  inference  re- 
specting the  nature  of  this  institution  which  facts  do  not  warrant. 
Let,  then,  the  reader  call  to  mind,  first  of  all,  the  circumstances  of 
the  Eastern  Church  for  the  last  fifteen  or  sixteen  hundred  years. 
Let  him  think  of  it  at  the  time  Constantinople  was  in  its  glory,  of 
the  different  sects  which  broke  from  it,  of  the  horrible  contentions 
which  took  place  between  those  sects  and  their  common  mother. 
Let  them  remember  the  degradation  which  every  part  of  this 
Church,  and  every  one  of  these  sects,  has  suffered  from  the  Otto- 
man power,  and  let  him  then  reflect  that  in  whatever  countries 
they  may  have  (Kvelt,  to  whatever  circumstances  of  good  or  evil 
fortune  they  may  have  been  exposed,  whatever  strifes  may  have 
gone  on  amongst  them,  this  institution  has  been  preserved  by  them 
ail.  Let  him  next  consider  the  different  circumstances  under 
which  Christianity  was  preached  and  adopted  in  the  different  na- 


346  SIGNS  OF  A 

tions  of  the  West,  the  different  influences  to  which  it  has  been  sub- 
jected, the  different  characters  of  the  different  races  which  com- 
pose it;  and  let  him  then  remember  that  all  these  nations,  under 
all  these  influences,  amidst  all  their  conflicts  with  the  eastern  part 
of  Christendom,  did,  without  one  clearly  established  exception, 
preserve  this  institution  till  the  sixteenth  century.  Let  him  con- 
sider the  circumstances  of  the  Reformation  leading  to  the  separa- 
tion of  the  nations,  to  a  violent  conflict  with  the  old  system  of 
Europe,  to  an  excessive  magnifying  of  individual  faith,  and  then 
reflect  that  this  universal  institution  was  preserved  in  all  the  Latin 
nations — among  the  Teutonic  nations  in  England,  in  Denmark,  and 
in  Sweden  ;  that  it  wras  rejected,  and  that  not  without  great  re- 
luctance, in  certain  parts  of  Germany,  in  Holland,  in  Switzerland, 
and  in  Scotland ;  that  in  each  of  these  countries  some  witness  of 
its  existence  has  been  preserved  ;  that  in  at  least  one  of  them  there 
are  those  wbo  think  that  it  is  more  necessary  now  than  in  any  past 
time.  Let  it  be  remembered,  further,  that  this  institution  has 
passed  over  to  the  continent  of  America ;  that  it  has  established 
itself  in  a  set  of  colonies  founded  by  Puritans  and  Quakers  ;  that 
it  grew  up  after  the  influence  of  England  had  ceased  in  those 
colonies;  that  without  the  least  state  patronage  it  is  making  itself 
an  instrument  for  diffusing  the  Gospel  from  those  colonies  to  many 
parts  of  the  world.  These  are  the  pretensions  which  Episcopacy 
makes  to  the  character  of  a  Catholic  institution. 

It  is  implied  in  what  I  have  said,  that  this  institution  has  a  char- 
acter of  permanence  as  well  as  of  universality.  It  is  implied  also 
that  this  permanence  is  something  different  from  the  permanence 
of  a  custom  which  has  first  derived  its  significance  from  some  local 
accident,  and  then  has  perpetuated  itself  by  the  care  of  some  body 
especially  created  by  its  conservation.  For  we  have  seen  this  in- 
stitution maintaining  itself  amidst  the  oppositions  and  contradic- 
tions of  bodies  differing  most  vehemently  with  each  other;  we  have 
seen  it  reappearing  when  all  local  habits  and  customs  were  adverse 
to  it.  How  then  has  it  been  preserved  or  seemed  to  be  preserved'? 
It  has  been  preserved  by  an  act  of  consecration  performed  through 
the  agency  of  three  existing  Bishops ;  signifying,  according  to  the 
faith  of  all  the  nations  and  ages  which  have  retained  it,  that  the  per- 
son newly  entering  upon  the  functions  receives  the  same  kind  of 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


347 


authority  and  the  same  kind  of  gifts  as  those  who  were  first  en- 
dowed with  it. 

It  must  be  quite  evident  to  the  reader,  that  the  facts  which  we 
have  now  been  considering,  touch  the  very  heart  of  the  questions 
which  I  have  been  discussing  in  this  work.  These  questions  have 
been,  Is  there  any  meaning  in  the  words  Kingdom  of  Christ  1  Do 
the  words  mean  what  they  seem  to  mean  ?  Are  there  any  facts 
in  the  history  of  the  world  which  seem  to  show  that  they  denote 
that  which  is  really  and  actually  existing  'I  Now  wTe  have  found 
a  series  of  facts,  all,  it  seemed  to  us,  bearing  to  the  same  point,  all 
proving  the  existence  of  an  universal  and  spiritual  society  ;  a 
society  maintaining  its  existence  amidst  the  greatest  perplexities 
and  contradictions  ;  a  society  of  which  all  the  conditions  are  inex- 
plicable unless  we  suppose  it  to  be  connected  with,  and  upheld  by, 
an  unseen  power.  But  as  all  these  signs  which  we  have  considered 
hitherto  exist  for  the  sake  of  men,  so  also  they  imply  the  agency 
of  men.  And  upon  the  character  of  this  agency  must  depend  the 
whole  character  of  the  kingdom  itself.  It  may  be  something  else, 
but  it  is  not  a  Commonwealth,  not  a  kingdom  according  to  any- 
admitted  sense  of  the  word,  if  it  have  not  certain  magistrates  or 
officers.  Practically  these  exist  even  in  those  societies  which  boast 
most  of  their  self-government ;  they  have  officers  whatever  be  the 
tenure  of  their  office.  And,  therefore,  we  must  either  give  up  all 
that  we  have  previously  maintained  as  untenable,  or  we  must  stea- 
dily consider  this  question— What  kind  of  officers  would  be  con- 
sistent with  the  character  of  such  a  kingdom  as  those  other  signs 
speak  of?  It  would  seem  clear  that  as  all  these  signs  pointed  to 
an  invisible  presence,  and  were  intended  to  admit  men  into  it,  these 
officers  must  be  constituted  with  a  view  to  the  same  end.  They 
must  be  intended  to  bring  before  men  the  fact  that  they  are  subject 
to  an  invisible  and  universal  Ruler. 

And  if  so  it  would  seem  also  necessary  that  they  should  exhibit 
Him  to  men  in  that  character,  and  in  those  offices  which  He  actu- 
ally came  to  perforin.  If  He  came  not  to  be  ministered  unto  but 
to  minister,  if  his  exercise  of  power  was  a  ministry,  theirs  must  be 
so  too.  They  can  look  upon  themselves  in  no  other  light  than  as 
ministers ;  they  cannot  suppose  their  power  diminished  by  this 
acknowledgment ;  they  cannot  suppose  that  their  power  will  be 


348 


SIGNS  OF  A 


real,  if  not  exercised  with  a  continual  recollection  of  it.  If  one 
chief  part  of  his  work  in  the  world  was  to  absolve  men  from  past 
evil,  from  the  power  of  present  evil,  from  the  danger  of  future  evil; 
and  if  there  be  a  continual  necessity  for  all  men  who  come  into  the 
world,  that  they  should  have  this  absolution,  and  if  He  exercise 
his  powers  or  make  himself  manifest  in  any  way  through  men,  one 
must  suppose  that  they  would  be  called  especially  to  represent 
Him  in  this  office  of  Absolver.  If  his  greatest  purpose  was  to  bind 
men  together  in  one  family,  if  the  office  in  which  He  entered  when 
He  ascended  on  high,  was  that  of  Head  and  overseer  of  this  family; 
if  all  his  other  acts  and  services  to  men  are  implied  and  presup- 
posed in  this,  one  must  conceive  the  highest  office  of  his  servants 
would  be  to  exhibit  Him  in  this  character,  and  so  to  make  it  known 
that  his  kingdom  was  a  real  kingdom,  and  one  that  ruleth  over  all. 
If,  finally,  Jesus  himself  when  upon  earth  received  a  formal  and 
outward  designation  to  the  office  which  He  had  undertaken,  that 
it  might  be  signified  to  men  on  what  terms  He  held  it — not  as  a 
separate  independent  Being,  but  as  one  with  the  Father,  and  hon- 
ouring Him  in  all  his  words  and  acts — it  would  seem  reasonable  to 
expect  that  an  equally  formal  and  visible  designation  would  bear 
witness  to  men,  that  those  offices  which  are  fulfilled  for  their  sakes, 
by  creatures  of  their  own  flesh  and  blood,  are  not  held  in  virtue  of 
any  qualities  or  merits  in  those  creatures,  but  are  held  from  Christ 
and  under  Christ  by  persons  who  can  exhibit  his  character  truly 
only  just  so  far  as  they  perform  their  work  faithfully. 

But  is  there  any  thing  in  the  language  of  the  New  Testament 
which  accords  with  these  anticipations  and  explains  these  facts. 
One  would  think  that  this  language,  like  that  which  refers  to  the 
institution  of  Baptism,  must  lie  on  the  very  surface  of  the  record, 
and  yet  must  connect  itself  with  all  its  deepest  announcements  ; 
otherwise  it  can  be  no  authority  for  institutions  which  pretend  to 
embody  the  whole  character  of  the  new  dispensation.  A  few 
casual  hints  could  never  suffice  as  the  warrant  for  fallible  men  to 
suppose  that  they  were  meant  to  be  the  ministers  of  Christ  and  to 
present  Him  before  men.  Still  less  could  such  hints  be  an  excuse 
fo»  sinful  men  who  should  take  upon  them,  In  God's  name,  to 
absolve  their  brethren.  Least  of  all  could  they  justify  the  exist- 
ence of  an  order,  which  assumes  such  a  singular  position,  and 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


349 


claims  such  high  functions  as  the  Episcopal.  The  mere  appearance 
of  such  an  office,  even  in  the  time  immediately  following  our  Lord's 
departure  from  the  world,  ought  not,  I  think,  to  be  looked  upon  as 
a  sufficient  reason  for  its  claiming  to  be  an  estate  of  his  kingdom, 
if  He  did  not  expressly  and  formally  institute  it  Himself. 

We  turn,  then,  to  the  Gospels  for  the  purpose  of  inquiring 
whether  they  offer  any  guidance  upon  the  subject ;  and  we  are 
immediately  encountered  by  the  history  of  the  selection  and  ap- 
pointment of  a  set  of  men  who  were  emphatically  distinct  from  all 
classes  which  had  existed  in  the  Jewish  polity.  They  are,  indeed, 
carefully  connected  with  that  polity ;  their  number  shows  that  they 
were  meant  to  remind  the  Jews  of  the  tribes  into  which  their 
nation  had  been  distributed.  They  were  all  Jews,  and  their  first 
commission  was  strictly  confined  to  the  house  of  Israel.  But  these 
circumstances  only  make  the  peculiarity  of  their  office  more  remark- 
able. The  most  evident  indications  were  given  to  them  even  from 
the  first,  even  at  the  time  when  they  were  least  capable  of  under- 
standing the  nature  of  their  service,  that  it  was  meant  to  transgress 
national  limitations.  At  the  same  time,  even  while  they  were  falling 
into  the  greatest  confusion  respecting  the  place  which  they  were  to 
occupy  in  the  world,  even  while  they  had  need  to  be  reminded 
continually  that  the  kings  of  the  Gentiles  exercised  dominion  over 
them,  but  that  it  was  not  so  to  be  in  the  Church  ;  they  were  still 
assured,  in  the  strongest  language,  that  they  were  to  perform  a 
wonderful  work,  and  to  be  endued  with  wonderful  powers ;  that 
he  who  received  them,  would  receive  their  Master ;  that  they  were 
sent  forth  by  Him,  even  as  He  was  sent  forth  by  the  Father. 

Every  one  must  perceive  that  these  intimations  are  not  scat- 
tered carelessly  through  the  Gospels,  that  they  form  a  part  of  their 
very  substance  and  tissue.  It  was  in  teaching  the  disciples  that 
those  who  became  as  little  children  were  greatest  in  the  kingdom 
of  heaven — that  their  rule  was  to  be  a  service — that  it  was  in  the 
acts  which  accompanied  these  teachings,  that  our  Lord's  own  life 
and  image  are  most  distinctly  brought  before  us.  Evidently  He 
never  separates  the  thought  of  training  them  in  their  office  from 
that  of  performing  his  own.  As  evidently  He  is  training  them  to 
an  office  ;  He  is  not  teaching  them  to  be  great  saints,  to  keep  up  a 
high  tone  of  personal  holiness  as  if  that  were  the  end  of  their  lives. 

23 


350 


SIGNS  OF  A 


But  He  is  teaching  them  that  they  have  a  work  to  do  even  as  He 
has ;  that  He  is  straitened  till  He  can  accomplish  his ;  that  they 
must  be  straitened  till  they  can  accomplish  theirs ;  and  that  in 
trying  to  accomplish  it,  they  will  most  find  that  they  are  lights  of 
the  world,  and  that  they  must  derive  their  light  continually  from 
Him.  So  that  if  we  called  the  four  "  The  Institution  of  a  Chris- 
tian Ministry,"  we  might  not  go  very  far  wrong,  or  lose  sight  of 
many  of  their  essential  qualities.  Above  all,  one  would  not  lose 
sight  of  the  different  crises  in  our  Lord's  life,  and  of  their  connec- 
tion with  different  discoveries  of  grace  and  truth  to  man.  Before 
the  resurrection  there  was  merely  the  general  commission,  "  Go 
and  preach  the  kingdom  of  God.  Heal  the  sick.  Cast  out  devils. 
Freely  ye  have  received,  freely  give."  Far  deeper  views  of  their 
office  were  brought  out  in  those  conversations  which  our  Lord  had 
with  them  the  night  before  his  Passion ;  views  of  all  connecting 
themselves  with  the  awful  facts  of  which  they  were  to  be  witnesses, 
and  with  the  mysterious  service  which  they  had  been  performing. 
But  it  was  not  till  our  Lord  came  back  from  the  grave,  with  the 
witness  and  the  power  of  a  new  life  for  man,  that  He  breathed 
upon  his  disciples  and  said,  "  Receive  ye  the  Holy  Ghost.  Whose- 
soever sins  ye  remit,  they  are  remitted ;  whosesoever  sins  ye  retain, 
they  are  retained."  It  was  not  till  He  was  just  leaving  them  that 
the  commission  was  given,  "  Go  ye  into  all  nations,"  and  the  pro- 
mise, "  Lo  I  am  with  you  always  even  unto  the  end  of  the  wrorld." 
And  it  was  not  till  He  had  ascended  on  high  that  the  powers  for 
fulfilling  this  commission  were  confirmed,  that  a  sign  was  given  of 
the  existence  of  a  union  which  the  distinctions  of  nations  and 
language  could  not  break,  that  they  were  declared  to  be  the  pillars 
of  an  universal  church. 

Now  these  poor  fishermen  could  not  doubt  for  a  moment  that 
these  powers  belonged  to  them  officially,  and  not  personally ;  and 
therefore  the  chief  question  to  be  considered  is  this :  Did  they  sup- 
pose this  kingdom  was  to  die  with  them,  or  that  they  were  to  per- 
petuate its  existence  ?  Were  they  to  perpetuate  it  in  the  manner 
in  which  our  Lord  himself  had  established  it,  or  in  some  other  man- 
ner ?  Was  the  change  which  the  new  circumstances  of  the  Church 
necessarily  occasioned  in  the  position  of  those  who  were  to  be  its 
ministers,  to  be  a  change  in  the  nature  of  their  office  and  institution, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


351 


or  only  a  change  in  their  numbers  and  in  the  circumstances  of  their 
jurisdiction  ?  Supposing  the  latter  to  be  the  case,  were  those  who 
succeeded  to  the  Apostolic  office  to  reckon  that  they  derived  their 
powers  less  immediately  from  Christ,  that  they  were  less  witnesses 
of  his  permanent  government,  than  those  who  received  their  first 
commission  from  Him  while  He  was  dwelling  upon  earth  1  If  these 
questions  be  answered  in  one  way,  those  nations  which  have  pre- 
served the  episcopal  institution  have  a  right  to  believe  that  they 
have  preserved  one  of  the  appointed  and  indispensable  signs  of  a 
spiritual  and  universal  society.  If  they  are  answered  in  the  other 
way,  it  seems  difficult  to  understand  how  such  a  universal  society 
can  exist  at  all. 

The  Quaker. 

But  we  must  consider  the  arguments  of  those  who  think  other- 
wise. The  Quaker  tells  us  at  once  that  we  have  described  a  formal 
and  not  a  spiritual  ministry ;  a  ministry  of  the  Old  Testament,  not 
of  the  New.  "  A  true  minister  is  consecrated  such  by  an  inward 
call.  The  voice  of  the  Spirit,  not  of  men,  invites  him  into  God's 
vineyard.  Older  and  more  experienced  men  may  judge  whether 
his  vocation  be  a  real  one ;  but  they  do  not  give  him  his  appoint- 
ment ;  still  less  can  they  confer  one  upon  persons  not  chosen  by 
God.  Under  the  old  dispensation  there  was  a  succession  to  the 
office  of  priest  in  a  certain  family.  Such  an  arrangement  belonged 
to  the  time;  it  is  done  away  in  Christ.  And  even  under  the  first 
covenant  there  was  a  race  of  prophets  who  simply  obeyed  the 
divine  voice,  simply  spoke  and  acted  as  they  were  moved  by  the 
Holy  Ghost.  The  (so  called)  Church  of  Christ  has  adopted  the 
obsolete  part  of  the  old  system,  has  rejected  the  living  and  spiritual 
part  of  it.  Lastly,  the  Christian  teacher  is  fitted  for  his  work  by 
the  teaching  of  the  Spirit,  not  by  the  preparation  of  human  culture.', 
Each  of  these  points  deserves  a  careful  consideration. 

1.  It  follows  from  that  doctrine  of  Baptism,  which  lies  at  the 
threshold  of  our  Churchmanship,  that  we  suppose  every  Christian 
infant  to  be  taken  under  the  guardianship  and  education  of  God's 
Holy  Spirit.  In  the  faith  of  this  truth,  the  well-instructed  parent 
brings  up  his  child.  Whatever  of  stern  discipline  he  uses  to  curb 
its  self-will,  whatever  of  tender  affections  he  manifests  to  call  forth 


352 


SIGNS  OF  A 


in  it  corresponding  affections,  hath  this  end,  that  the  subject  of  his 
invisible  and  temporary  government  may  be  brought  to  feel  that  it 
is  under  the  government  of  an  unseen  Teacher ;  that  the  object  of 
his  imperfect  and  wavering  love  may  perceive  that  it  is  unceasingly 
tended  and  brooded  over  by  a  love  which  is  unchangeable  and  im- 
perishable.   Which  life-giving  tru  h,  when  it  has  dawned  upon 
the  mind  of  the  child,  will  create  some  blossoms  and  buds  there, 
upon  which  the  parent  will  gaze  with  an  anxious  but  confiding  eye. 
Strange  thoughts  and  impulses  before  unknown, — wonder  respect- 
ing his  own  condition. — hopes  stretching  into  infinity, — a  deepen- 
ing sense  of  ever  present  evil — a  brightening  view  of  an  ever-pre- 
sent Deliverer.   Such  mingled  emotions,  as  he  watches  them  arising, 
the  foster-father  knows  assuredly  to  be  indications  that  his  care  has 
not  been  in  vain,  and  that  the  boy  is  learning  the  secret  of  his 
other — his  royal — parentage.    And  gradually  he  imparts  to  him 
the  conviction,  that  not  merely  his  adoption  and  expected  inheri- 
tance appertain  to  another  region  than  this,  but  that  all  the  dim 
desires  and  longings  which  have  pointed  to  them,  have  been  hea- 
venly inspirations.    Joyful  and  consolatory  tidings  indeed, — yet, 
not  precious  only  for  their  own  sake,  but  as  interpreting  other  feel- 
ings and  impulses  which  are  to  arise  within  him  hereafter.  For 
now  the  questions,  What  is  he  ?  or,  Whither  he  is  going  ?  are  not 
all  that  occupy  him ;  but  what  relations  exist  between  him  and  his 
fellow-men  ?  how  is  he  to  act  upon  them  ?  what  is  his  destined 
vocation  ?    In  pursuing  this  inquiry,  he  will  remember,  first  of  all, 
that  which  he  has  often  been  told  by  his  earliest  instructors,  that 
just  so  far  as  he  nourishes  all  gentle  affections  within  him,  and  keeps 
himself  from  sensual  defilement,  and  seeks  the  temper  of  a  little 
child,  and  thinks  on  things  which  are  lovely  and  pure,  and  main- 
tains a  cheerful  heart,  and  does  good  according  to  his  opportunity, 
and  strives  to  avoid  noisy  excitements  of  the  flesh  or  the  spirit,  and 
is  not  impatient  of  present  perplexity,  or  greedy  of  distinctions, — 
so  far  he  will  be  able,  in  quiet  meditation  and  prayer,  to  learn  the 
mind  of  the  Spirit,  and  to  know  in  what  part  of  his  vineyard  God  has 
destined  him  to  labour.    And  then,  if  the  circumstances  of  his  out- 
ward position  show  him  that  he  is  intended  to  be  one  of  those  who 
minister  to  the  carnal  necessities  of  men,  and  the  apparent  end  of 
whose  vocation  is  mercenary,  he  will  be  sure  that  in  this  station, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


353 


whether  esteemed  among  men  or  not,  he  is  to  glorify  God,  and  vin- 
dicate his  calling  from  every  deserved  reproach,  maintaining  a  free, 
and  a  noble,  and  heavenly  spirit,  amidst  all  temptations  to  be  sordid 
and  secular.  Or  if  a  secret  impulse  of  his  spirit,  not  the  less  to  be 
heeded  because  outward  influences  and  early  education  may  have 
co-operated  with  it,  or  have  created  it,  should  lead  him  to  those  pur- 
suits which  have  their  basis  in  science,  and  require  in  him  a  scien- 
tific insight,  as  well  as  all  diligence  in  the  study  of  experiments 
and  facts, — then,  whether  it  be  man's  physical  structure,  and  the 
secret  powers  of  his  life,  and  the  circumstances  of  his  diseases  and 
decay,  which  most  engage  his  thoughts, — or  whether  it  be  the  holy 
ordinances,  by  which  our  social  position  is  upheld,  and  our  wrongs 
redressed, — or  whether  he  is  drawn  to  look  still  more  comprehen- 
sively at  our  different  relations,  and  to  meditate  on  those  mysterious 
powers  of  sympathy,  or  fear,  or  awe,  which  are  the  real  bonds  of 
human  policy,  he  will  feel  that  it  is  a  Divine  Instructor  who  is 
marking  him  out  for  a  physician,  a  lawyer,  or  a  statesman  ;  and  to 
the  same  watchful  guidance  he  must  look  to  direct  his  intellect 
while  he  is  preparing  for  the  work,  and  w7hile  he  is  actually  en- 
gaged in  it  to  preserve  him  in  the  fear  of  God,  and  in  honourable 
affectionate  thoughts  of  his  fellow-men,  that  he  may  not  dare  to 
follow  any  low  or  selfish  impulses,  or  be  ever  tempted  to  think  of 
his  brethren  as  the  legitimate  victims  of  quackery,  chicanery,  or 
party-spirit.  Nor  can  I  so  far  yield  to  prejudices  and  feelings 
which  I  respect,  and  which  I  would  not  wish  to  remove  from  the 
mind  of  any  Quaker  till  I  can  show  him  what  I  conceive  is  the 
truth  which  they  pervert,  as  not  to  carry  this  principle  a  step 
farther,  and  to  maintain,  that  every  soldier  of  really  brave  and 
gentle  heart  has  been  led  to  reflect  on  the  preciousness  of  national 
life  and  the  duty  of  upholding  it  even  at  the  cost  of  individual  life, 
awful  as  that  is,  and  has  been  taught  to  dedicate  his  energies  to 
the  preservation  of  this  higher  life,  not  by  an  evil  spirit,  but  by  that 
same  Spirit  of  truth  and  love,  who,  when  He  would  lay  the  foun- 
dation of  his  new  kingdom  on  earth,  chose  for  the  first  subject  and 
witness  of  it  a  Centurion  of  the  Italian  band.  But,  when  a  young 
man,  studying  in  all  things  to  approve  himself  to  his  great  Task- 
master, finds  not  in  himself  any  of  these  particular  promptings, 
but  rather  a  large  and  general  desire  to  be  the  servant  of  his  race, — 


354 


SIGNS  OF  A 


when  a  certain  stronger  sense  is  given  to  him  than  to  others  of 
man's  highest  destiny,  mixed,  perhaps,  with  a  less  keen  perception 
than  in  other  men  would  be  desirable  of  those  necessities  which, 
though  they  may  be  baptized  with  a  heavenly  life  and  adopted  into 
religion,  are  themselves  of  the  earth,  earthy, — when  spiritual  forms, 
which  the  majority  have  need  to  see  reflected  in  sensible  mirrors, 
rise  up  before  him  in  their  naked  substance  and  majesty, — when 
good  and  evil  present  themselves  to  him,  not  as  means  to  some  re- 
sult, but  as  themselves  the  great  ends  and  results  to  which  all  is 
tending, — when  the  conflict  which  is  going  on  within  himself,  leads 
him  to  feel  his  connexion  with  his  kind, — when  there  is  imparted 
to  him  a  lively  sense  of  temptation,  and  of  its  being  most  perilous 
to  those  whose  objects  and  vocation  are  the  highest, — when  he  has 
been  endued  with  a  certain  habit  of  measuring  acts  and  events,  not 
by  their  outward  magnitude,  but  according  to  their  spiritual  pro- 
portions and  effects, — when  he  has  been  taught  to  reverence 
poverty  and  helplessness, — when  he  has  understood  that  that  truth 
is  the  highest,  not  which  is  the  most  exclusive,  but  which  is  the 
most  universal, — when  the  immediate  vision  of  God,  and  entire 
subjection  of  heart  and  spirit  to  his  loving  will,  seem  to  him  the 
great  gifts  intended  for  man,  after  which  every  one  for  himself  and 
his  fellows  may  aspire ;  then,  surely,  if  a  strong  combination  of 
outward  circumstances  do  not  oblige  him  to  what  perhaps  is  a  still 
more  glorious,  though  more  painful  task  of  yielding  to  a  wisdom 
which  he  adores  without  understanding,  he  may  conclude  that  it  is 
to  no  partial  or  specific  service,  but  to  that  one  which  we  emphati- 
cally call  The  Ministry ,  that  the  Divine  Voice  is  inviting  and  com- 
manding him. 

Thus  far,  then,  our  opinion  respecting  inward  calls  seems  to 
accord  with  that  of  the  Quaker,  only  that  we  carry  it  farther. 
He  considers  that  there  is  one  inward  call,  which  is  needful  for  a 
Christian,  and  another  which  is  needful  for  the  Christian  preacher. 

We  contend  that  every  Christian  should  believe  himself  called 
to  every  work  in  which  he  engages ;  and  that  except  he  believe 
this,  the  work  will  be  unholy  and  cheerless,  pursued  without  confi- 
dence in  God  or  any  expectation  of  high  and  worthy  fruit.  Not 
that  in  this  I  mean  to  explain  away  the  express  call  of  the  minis- 
ter, as  if  it  meant  nothing  more  than  what  every  one  pleases  it  to 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


355 


mean ;  my  wish  is  rather  to  maintain,  that  the  language,  which 
we  use  in  reference  to  the  highest  pursuit,  determines  the  tone  which 
we  should  adopt  in  speaking,  or  at  least  in  thinking,  concerning  all 
our  pursuits.  Other  men  may  have  honourable  thoughts  and  inspi- 
rations, and  may  honestly  obey  them,  and  silently  and  implicitly 
attribute  them  to  their  true  source.  But  the  minister  of  God,  with 
fear  and  trembling  indeed,  but  still  without  cowardly  diffidence,  is 
to  declare  to  himself  and  to  others,  the  real  fountain  of  that  which 
is  within  him.  He  cannot  teach  others  to  believe  themselves  the 
temples  of  the  living  God,  if  he  dare  not  acknowledge  the  plain 
consequences  of  this  doctrine  in  relation  to  himself. 

But  then  this  question  remains, — If,  in  every  rightly  ordered  com- 
munity, the  tradesman,  the  lawyer,  the  physician,  the  soldier,  the 
statesman,  believes  that  the  secret  influences  which  determined  him 
to  embrace  his  own  vocation  in  preference  to  any  other,  were  not 
themselves  his  title  to  enter  upon  that  vocation,  but  only  the  pre- 
disposing motives  to  seek  for  such  a  title, — is  the  analogy  in  this 
instance  violated,  is  the  immediate  minister  of  God  in  a  different 
predicament  ?  Does  the  secret  call  in  his  spirit  make  him  a  min- 
ister, or  does  it  only  set  him  upon  inquiring  what  is  the  lawful  way 
of  becoming  one  ?  I  confess  I  do  not  understand  what  should 
make  the  difference.  I  can  see,  indeed,  that  the  call  is  to  a  higher 
work.  I  can  see  that  it  has  need  to  be  more  distinctly  apprehend- 
ed as  to  its  principle  and  origin,  by  him  whose  very  outward  duty 
is  a  spiritual  one,  than  by  others.  But  I  cannot  see  that  the  differ- 
ence is  one  of  kind,  and  that  while  the  Spirit  of  God  in  all  other 
cases  moves  a  man  to  adapt  himself  to  some  rule  or  order,  here  it 
teaches  him  that  he  has  no  need  of  such  an  order,  but  that  the 
M  motion  "  is  a  substitute  for  it.  I  should  have  expected,  certainly, 
that  the  minister  of  God, — if  his  very  name  be  not  a  mere  inven- 
tion ;  if  there  be  any  communication  between  heaven  and  earth ; 
if  any  men  be  intended  or  called  to  teach  their  brethren  in  mat- 
ters directly  pertaining  to  God, — should  receive  his  commission  in 
some  very  different  way  from  that  in  which  the  member  of  any 
other  profession  receives  his.  I  should  have  expected  that  some 
scheme  would  have  been  devised,  to  show  that  he  did  not  derive 
his  authority  from  the  king  of  his  land,  or  from  any  learned  incor- 
poration, or  from  any  limited  power  whatever.    But  I  should  never 


356  SIGNS  OF  A 

have  expected  that,  whereas  in  other  cases  the  witness  of  a  man's 
own  mind,  and  its  inward  impulses,  though  most  needful  for  his 
own  satisfaction,  though  most  needful  to  convince  him  that  he  is 
walking  in  the  road  appointed  for  him,  are  yet  considered  wholly 
inadequate  to  confer  authority,  and  affirm  his  position  to  others, 
here,  in  an  office  especially  instituted  for  the  sake  of  mankind,  for 
the  poor  and  ignorant, — an  office  in  which  the  individual  perform- 
ing it  is  to  be  especially  hidden  and  forgotten,  and  the  majesty  of 
God  asserted, — these  motions  should  be  all  in  all,  and  no  token 
given  which  all  men  alike  can  apprehend,  as  to  the  extent  and  de- 
rivation of  the  influence  which  they  are  intended  to  obey. 

2.  Next  comes  the  question,  so  often  discussed  in  previous  sec- 
tions, of  the  relation  between  the  Old  and  the  New  Testament. 
In  the  Jewish  Commonwealth,  as  the  Quaker  confesses,  we  disco- 
ver at  first  a  strict,  definite  organization;  a  priesthood  limited  to  a 
certain  tribe,  a  place  and  time  appointed  for  sacrifices,  the  sacri- 
fices themselves  appointed.  Here  is  a  rigid  system,  the  author  of 
which  now  and  then,  as  in  the  case  of  Eli,  asserts  as  well  his  own 
prerogative,  as  the  fact,  that  this,  like  every  system,  exists  for  an 
end  and  is  not  itself  an  end,  by  infringing  some  of  its  maxims. 
Yet  we  know  that  this  divine  precaution  was  not  adequate  to  pre- 
vent a  dead  sense  of  routine,  injurious  to  the  working  of  the  sys- 
tem itself,  from  creeping  over  the  hearts  of  the  people  who  were 
subject  to  it.  Wherefore  the  next  contrivance  which  wre  notice  in 
this  celestial  machinery,  seems  intended  to  counteract  this  tendency, 
without  any  violation  of  uniformity.  When  the  ecclesiastical  con- 
stitution had  been  well  established,  and  its  principle  explained  by  its 
operation,  a  new  order  of  men  is  raised  up,  for  the  express  purpose, 
it  seems,  of  proving  that  forms  and  institutions  are  indications  of 
our  relation  to  God,  and  means  of  attaining  to  intercourse  with 
Him,  but  neither  create  the  one,  nor  are  substitutes  for  the  other. 
This  being  the  very  intent  of  the  Prophet's  vocation,  several  con- 
sequences follow  inevitably.  His  functions  cannot  be  defined  in  a 
ritual.  It  cannot  be  ascertained  by  a  formal  law,  as  in  the  case  of 
the  priest,  to  what  portion  of  the  community  he  shall  belong. 
Either  of  these  limitations  would  defeat  the  end  of  his  existence, 
he  would  cease  to  fill  his  proper  place  in  the  great  order.  The 
prophet  lives  as  the  witness  of  a  continual  presence  and  power 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


357 


dwelling  in  the  nation,  which  it  may  forget,  but  of  which  it  can- 
not rid  itself.  He  must  rise  up,  as  the  emblem  of  the  conscience 
which  he  awakens,  of  the  law  concerning  which  he  testifies ;  he 
must  come  as  a  thief  in  the  night  upon  the  guilty  soul ;  he  must 
not  allow  it  to  forget  itself  in  the  dizzy  whirl  of  events,  or  the 
monotony  of  observances;  he  must  make  it  feel  that  both  alike 
speak  of  a  living  person,  who  is  coming  out  of  his  place  to  judge, 
whose  day  is  at  hand.  To  fasten  this  fact  upon  the  mind  and  heart 
of  the  people,  he  must  oftentimes  do  strange  acts  ;  he  and  his 
children  are  for  signs  and  wonders ;  he  must  walk  barefoot ;  he 
must  carry  on  a  mimic  siege ;  he  must  see  his  wife  die  and  not 
weep;  he  must  marry  an  adulteress;  by  all  mean  she  must  break 
the  yoke  of  familiarity  and  custom.  And  yet  he  is  most  orderly. 
From  first  to  last  he  is  a  witness  for  order.  The  neglect  of  insti- 
tutions, the  indifference  to  divine  precepts,  the  recklessness  of  the 
everlasting  covenant;  these  are  his  charges  against  kings,  and 
priests,  and  people.  If  he  reveals  the  in  ward  law  of  God,  it  is  in 
the  outward  law  that  he  learns  its  nature  and  mystery;  if  he  de- 
sires communion  with  God,  it  is  in  the  temple  he  expects  to  enjoy 
it,  and  to  behold  his  glory ;  if  he  is  stricken  with  a  sense  of  his 
own  iniquity,  and  of  his  people's,  it  is  a  coal  from  the  altar  touch- 
ing his  lips,  which  purges  it  away ;  the  desolation  of  the  beauti- 
ful city  calls  forth  all  his  human  feelings ;  the  loss  of  the  Shechi- 
nah  is  the  key-note  to  his  most  melancholy  and  awful  religious 
musings. 

Such  are  the  most  obvious  characterestics  of  the  Jewish  prophet, 
the  appointed  witness  for  a  spiritual  faculty  and  life  in  man.  Ac- 
cording to  the  doctrine,  then,  that  an  outward  appointment  is  the 
great  cause  of  corruption  and  hypocrisy  in  the  Church,  it  ought  to 
appear  that  the  race  of  prophets  was  far  more  uniformly  pure  and 
exemplary  than  the  race  of  priests;  that  the  abominations  which 
we  know  are  charged  upon  the  one,  had  no  counterparts  among 
the  other.  But  if  we  are  to  believe  Scripture,  this  was  not  the 
case  at  all.  There  were  just  as  many  false  prophets  as  there  were 
scandalous  priests  ;  just  as  many  who  pretended  to  be  uttering  the 
word  of  the  Lord,  when  they  were  but  speaking  a  vision  of  their 
own  hearts,  as  there  were  who  could  not  distinguish  between  the 
clean  and  the  unclean,  or  who  made  the  offering  of  the  Lord  to  be 


358 


SIGNS  OF  A 


abhorred.  There  were  as  many  who  abused  the  spiritual  call  as 
the  outward  ordination.  But  this  remark  is  by  the  way.  My  main 
obiect  is  to  fix  the  reader's  attention  upon  this  point,  that  the  best 
prophets  were  still  Old  Testament  ministers ;  that  they  were  not 
ministers  of  the  Spirit.  The  Quakers  will  not  deny  this.  But 
wherein  did  the  prophet  come  short  of  the  dignity  of  a  New 
Testament  minister  ?  He  exactly  answers  to  their  definition  of 
one.  Take  away  the  law,  the  priesthood,  the  sacrifices,  and  leave 
simply  the  prophet,  and  we  have  the  Quaker  idea  of  the  Christian 
ministry  in  its  most  noble  and  complete  manifestation  :  for  the  Jew 
is  a  witness  to  spiritual  life ;  he  obeys  a  spiritual  impulse ;  he 
speaks  of  the  Living  Word  dwelling  in  the  heart ;  he  speaks 
by  the  Spirit.  Surely,  if  they  are  right,  he  stands  on  a  much 
higher  level  than  Peter  and  Paul,  the  witnesses  for  outward  acts, 
the  preachers  of  Christ's  death  and  resurrection.  And  so  the  early 
Friends  evidently  thought ;  for  all  the  precedents  of  their  proceed- 
ings are  drawn  from  the  records  of  his.  Their  sudden  appearances, 
and  utterances,  and  witnesses  at  the  gates  of  cities,  were  copied  (not 
acurately,  I  conceive,  since  the  reverence  for  order  and  institutions, 
for  sacred  places  and  national  worship,  which  were  so  conspic- 
uous in  the  original,  were  wholly  omitted  in  the  imitation — but 
still  copied)  from  the  acts  of  the  Old  Testament  seer,  and  had  no 
sort  of  type  or  warrant  in  apostolical  practice.  For,  strange  to 
say,  the  apostles  of  our  Lord,  appointed  to  introduce  a  new  dis- 
pensation, addressing  a  sense-hardened  people,  and  foretelling  the 
most  awful  crisis  of  their  history  as  at  hand,  did  nevertheless,  in 
their  outward  conduct  and  bearing,  entirely  depart  from  that  pro- 
phetical model  which  was  constantly  before  their  eyes,  and  which, 
for  other  purposes,  they  studied  most  diligently.  All  the  sensible 
and  startling  peculiarities  of  the  prophetical  character  were  aban- 
doned by  men  who  proclaimed  that  they  were  sent  by  Heaven  to 
announce  the  fulfilment  of  the  promise  made  to  the  fathers,  the 
accomplishment  of  law  and  prophecy.  Far,  indeed,  were  they 
from  saying,  that  the  function  was  obsolete ;  its  essential  charac- 
teristics were  represented  in  themselves.  They  had  no  authority 
to  declare,  that  even  its  accidental  features  were  lost,  any  more 
than  they  had  authority  to  abolish  sacrifices  or  circumcision.  Ag- 
abus  might  still  bind  the  girdle  on  his  knee;  the  daughters  of 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


359 


Phillip  the  deacon  might  prophecy  ;  but  the  especial  ministers  of 
the  New  Covenant  were  throughout  asserting  for  themselves  a  dif- 
ferent function  from  this.  They  would  not  even  submit  to  the 
voices  of  brethren  and  sisters  whom  they  acknowledged  to  be 
rightfully  inspired.  Paul  went  up  to  Jerusalem  in  defiance  of  their 
expostulations  and  warnings. 

But  whence  this  difference  1  What  is  the  explanation  of  it  ? 
We  say,  that  the  difference  arose  from  this,  that  in  the  days  of  the 
prophets  the  Spirit  was  not  yet  given,  for  that  Christ  was  not  yet 
glorified.  The  priests  and  sacrifices  in  the  Jewish  commonwealth 
testified  of  a  divine  constitution  established  in  the  Word.  The 
order  of  prophets  testified  of  a  divine  Spirit  actuating  and  ener- 
gizing in  man  ;  but  as  the  person  of  the  Word  was  not  yet  mani- 
fested, so  neither  was  the  person  of  the  Spirit.  The  mystery  was 
hid  for  ages  and  generations.  Each  new  step  in  the  divine  plan  is 
a  preparation  for  the  discovery  of  it ;  and  faithful  men  are  enabled 
to  apprehend  it  before  it  is  yet  fully  made  known ;  first,  by  the 
undeviating  regularity  of  the  priesthood,  like  the  settled  succession 
of  day  and  night;  then,  by  the  gusts  of  prophetical  inspiration, 
like  the  wind  blowing  where  it  lists ;  lastly,  by  the  inseparable 
connexion  of  one  with  the  other.  The  one,  when  alone,  a  mere 
collection  of  chords,  from  which  no  sound  of  music  could  proceed ; 
the  other,  at  best,  a  mere  iEolian  harp,  from  which  a  sweet  note 
might  now  and  then  come  forth,  but  utterly  incapable  of  satisfying 
the  soul  with  any  sustained  or  continuous  harmony.  Bat  when  the 
Son  of  God  came  in  human  flesh,  to  proclaim  Himself  the  source 
of  all  the  order  of  the  universe,  it  was  inevitable  that  the  outward 
organization  which  had  been  foretelling  his  advent  should  be  con- 
verted into  one  which  assumed  it  for  its  ground  ;  and  for  the  same 
reason  it  was  to  be  expected,  that  when  the  Spirit  of  Truth,  who 
proceedeth  from  the  Father  and  the  Son,  was  given  by  the  ascended 
Lord,  to  testify  of  the  Father  and  of  Him,  the  prophetical  dispen- 
sation, which  had  been  opening  the  way  for  this  great  manifesta- 
tion, should  undergo  a  corresponding  change.  The  occasional 
glimpses  of  a  Divine  Lord  of  man,  the  beautiful  vision  in  the  plain 
of  Mamre,  the  angel  in  the  bush,  and  he  who  did  wondrously  be- 
fore Manoah, — these  preludings  of  the  incarnation,  as  Bishop  Bull 
calls  them,  had  been  lost  in  the  full  swell  of  the  words,  "  Lo,  I  am 


360 


SIGNS  OF  A 


with  you  always."  The  crucified  man  had  been  declared,  by  the 
resurrection,  to  be  the  Son  of  God  with  power, — the  ever-present 
King  of  man.  But  the  foretastes  of  this  revelation  in  the  Old 
Testament,  did  not  fall  farther  short  of  the  revelation  itself,  than 
the  sudden  inspirations  under  the  Old  Testament  fell  short  of  the 
meaning  expressed  in  the  words,  "  When  he  ascended  up  on  high, 
he  received  gifts  for  men,  that  the  Lord  God  might  dwell  among 
them."  The  Apostles,  therefore,  could  not,  without  sinking  their 
dignity  as  New  Testament  ministers,  have  given  the  same  form  to 
the  prophetical  office  which  it  had  assumed  under  the  old  dispensa- 
tion. They  believed  themselves  continually,  not  momentarily  in- 
spired ;  they  felt  that  it  was  their  sin  to  doubt  of  this  continued 
inspiration  ;  a  sin  not  to  act  upon  the  principle  of  it ;  a  sin  to  do 
any  thing  which  would  weaken  the  perception  of  it  in  the  minds 
of  those  to  whom  they  preached.  They  therefore  delivered  their 
appointed  message  with  perfect  calmness  and  coherency.  They 
had  their  commission,  and  this  was  a  surer  token  that  they  had  the 
Spirit  with  them  to  govern  them,  than  any  impulses  and  emotions 
could  possibly  have  been.  They  were  therefore  always  ready  to 
preach,  and  always  able  to  be  silent.  This  was  their  notion  of  a 
New  Testament  ministry,  and  wTe  say  it  ought  to  be  ours.  As 
ministers  of  the  New  Covenant,  we  must  draw  our  rule  of  conduct 
from  Apostles  and  not  from  Prophets.  It  is  nothing  to  us  that  the 
holy  men  of  old  were  sometimes  called  from  the  sheep-folds  to  be 
the  witnesses  of  a  spiritual  presence  to  the  people,  and  that  this 
inward  call  sufficed,  without  any  other  designation.  We  know 
that  the  Apostles  of  our  Lord  received  from  Him  a  formal  and  ex- 
press designation,  before  He  gave  them  powers  to  go  and  preach 
in  the  villages  whither  He  himself  would  come ;  that  after  his 
resurrection,  He  gave  those  Apostles  a  new  and  more  awful  com- 
mission, accompanying  it  with  the  words,  "  Receive  the  Holy 
Ghost  $"  that  after  his  ascension  they  completed  their  numbers  by 
an  external  arrangement  before  the  Holy  Ghost  endued  them  with 
powers  to  testify  of  the  risen  King.  It  is  nothing  to  us  if  these 
prophets,  in  exact  conformity  with  the  nature  of  their  office,  and 
the  end  for  which  it  was  instituted,  waited  for  a  conscious  afflatus 
before  they  could  utter  their  divine  oracles.  We  know  that  St. 
Paul  said, — "  If  I  do  this  willingly,  I  have  a  reward ;  but  if  against 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


361 


my  irill,  a  dispensation  of  the  Gospel  is  committed  to  me.  .  .  . 
A  necessity  is  laid  upon  me,  yea,  wo  is  me,  if  I  preach  not  the 
Gospel."  We  know  that  he  set  it  forth  as  the  peculiarity  of  a 
New  Testament  preacher,  that  he  put  no  veil  over  his  face,  that 
he  used  gr3at  plainness  of  speech.  We  know  that  now  his  preach- 
ing consists  of  a  plain  statement  of  actual  facts,  now  of  a  long  his- 
torical deduction,  now  turns  upon  some  point  connected  with  the 
habits,  national  character,  and  circumstances  of  the  people  to  whom 
he  speaks, — is  not  merely  eloquent,  but  at  times  most  skilfully 
rhetorical, — but  never  exhibits  a  man  over-mastered  by  a  power 
which  prohibits  him  from  expressing  himself  in  that  way  which  is 
most  suitable  to  the  spiritual  wants  of  his  hearers.  Was  this  be- 
cause he  wanted  zeal  ?  Or  was  it  because  he  possessed  an  intensity 
of  zeal  which  would  never  permit  him  for  a  moment  to  lose  sight 
of  the  end  of  his  apostleship  ;  to  sacrifice  it  for  the  sake  of  any 
pleasant  feelings  or  emotions ;  to  think  about  his  own  mind,  when 
his  business  was  to  go  forward  ;  or  to  overlook  any  instruments 
which  God  had  placed  within  his  reach  ?  Was  it  because  he  had 
not  the  Spirit  ?  Or  was  it  because  he  was  under  the  habitual  gov- 
ernment of  that  Spirit  who  hindered  him  from  surrendering  him- 
self to  his  own  tastes  or  emotions,  to  his  own  projects  or  fears,  and 
which  converted  every  object  in  nature  or  art,  all  history,  all  pass- 
ing events,  to  the  service  of  the  sanctuary  ?  Once  more,  it  is  no- 
thing to  us  that,  under  the  old  economy,  there  were  prophetesses  as 
well  as  prophets,  and  that  during  the  interval  between  the  estab- 
lishment of  the  Christian  Church  and  the  destruction  of  the  Jewish 
Commonwealth,  this  part  of  the  system  may,  like  all  its  other  mere 
accidents,  have  been  gradually  disappearing  indeed,  but  not  have 
actually  ceased.  If  there  had  been  any  restriction  whatever,  any, 
I  mean,  but  what  is  reserved  in  the  depths  of  Divine  Wisdom,  as 
to  the  subjects  of  the  prophetical  call,  it  would  not  seem  to  have 
answered  its  purpose  as  a  balance  to  the  rigid  formality  of  the 
priestly  institution.  But  when  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  an- 
nounced, that  he  would  have  women  keep  silence  in  the  churcheSj 
we  perceive  at  once  that  the  principle  which  had  been  all  along 
asserted  in  the  regular  organization  of  the  Jewish  Church,  now 
that  the  formal  constitution  had  been  brought  into  union  with  the 
spiritual  power,  was  to  become  an  universal  law.    If  St.  Paul  had 


362  SIGNS  OF  A. 

merely  suggested  this  rule  as  one  which  was  expedient,  in  order  to 
meet  Jewish  and  Heathen  prejudices,  we  easily  admit  that  the  Om- 
nipotent Spirit  might  be  expected  at  different  periods  pr  actically  to 
annul  it.  But  if  he  was  actually  restraining  a  practice  common 
among  both  JewTs  and  Heathens,  and  if  he  was  doing  this  profess- 
edly upon  principles  connected  with  the  divinely  appointed  relation 
of  the  sexes  to  each  other,  we  can  have  no  doubt  that  the  Spirit 
of  Order,  by  the  mouth  of  his  chosen  witness,  was  announcing  the 
lawT  of  his  own  commonwealth.  And  that  the  Holy  Spirit  does 
not  break  down  eternal  laws  and  ordinances,  for  the  mere  sake  of 
bearing  witness  to  his  power,  is  one  of  the  fundamental  maxims  of 
Christian  morality ;  because  power  is  the  handmaid  of  love  and 
order,  and  when  it  forsakes  their  fellowship,  and  claims  a  separate 
existence,  is  devilish,  not  godlike. 

In  this  case,  as  in  all  the  others  we  have  as  yet  considered,  it 
seems  that  the  Quaker  is  guilty  of  the  very  sin  which  he  imputes  to  his 
brethren  ;  that  he  is  the  reviver  of  the  old  economy  while  he  is 
professing  to  assert  the  glory  of  the  Gospel.  And  it  will  be  seen 
how  remarkably  his  complaints  against  a  succession  of  ministers 
illustrate  this  tendency.  Just  as  he  will  not  allow7  that  in  an  univer- 
sal and  spiritual  dispensation  Baptism  can  take  the  place  of  Circum- 
cision, the  Eucharist  of  the  Passover,  so  he  cannot  understand  howT 
in  such  a  dispensation  the  succession  by  merely  laying  on  of  hands 
can  take  place  of  the  Levitical  and  Aaronic  succession.  And  just 
as  I  maintained,  that  the  difference  between  a  national  dispensation 
and  one  which  is  spiritual  and  universal  is  realized  in  the  difference 
between  these  two  sets  of  institutions,  and  is  lost  when  the  old 
institutions  are  merely  abolished  ;  so  I  maintain,  that  the  same 
difference  is  set  in  the  clearest  light  by  the  change  from  a  ministry 
which  is  permanent  in  a  particular  tribe  and  family,  to  one  which 
is  perpetuated  by  ecclesiastical  tradition,  and  that  those  who,  upon 
Quaker  grounds,  reject  this  last  method  as  carnal  and  secular,  have 
no  escape  but  that  of  slavishly  imitating  the  most  superficial  and 
transitory  peculiarities  of  a  by-gone  period. 

3.  The  last  point  to  be  considered  is  that  of  ministerial  gifts. 
There  were,  as  every  one  knows,  under  the  old  dispensation,  schools 
of  the  Prophets.  But  we  must  not  lay  such  stress  upon  this  fact  as 
to  deny,  that  in  many  cases  the  Prophet's  call  was  itself  that  which 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


363 


endowed  him  with  the  functions  necessary  for  his  task.  At  any 
rate  there  was,  it  should  seem,  no  outward  act  by  which  he  became 
invested  with  the  powers  that  he  afterwards  exercised.*  If  what 
I  have  said  respecting  the  nature  of  his  office  be  true,  it  could  not 
have  been  otherwise.  There  was  no  great  difficulty  in  understand- 
ing, that  the  Priest  might  be  attired  with  his  solemn  robes,  and  in- 
vested with  his  awful  authority,  by  a  right  of  consecration  ;  his 
endowments  were  matter  of  formal,  legal  explanation.  But  no  idea 
which  had  yet  been  presented  to  the  mind  of  the  Jew,  could  have 
enabled  him  to  understand  how  gifts  of  so  subtle  and  inexplicable 
a  character  as  those  which  the  Prophets  exercised,  could  have  been 
transmitted  by  any  similar  method.  The  man  of  holy  meditation, 
whose  life  is  a  witness  to  his  own  continual  sense  of  unseen  pres- 
ence, comes  forth,  and  awakens  in  kings,  or  priests,  or  people,  the 
feeling  of  their  own  subjection  to  an  eternal  law,  which  they  have 
forgotten  or  resisted.  By  eloquence  and  song  he  rouses  the  spell- 
bound, death-stricken  conscience  of  the  nation  ;  compels  it  to  re- 
member that  it  is  within  the  bonds  of  an  everlasting  covenant ;  and 
shows  what  judgments  must  startle  it  out  of  its  long  sensual  dream. 
The  acknowledgment  of  an  operation  from  above,  inspiring  the 
understanding  of  the  Prophet,  comes  at  the  same  moment  to  the 
mind  of  the  hearer  with  the  consciousness  of  a  secret  wonderful 
operation  upon  himself.  He  does  not  distinguish  with  any  accuracy 
between  the  power  which  has  raised  the  teacher  into  a  poet,  and 
himself  into  a  man ;  still  less  does  he  know  from  whom  either  impulse 
proceeds.  He  perceives  only  that  there  is  some  deep  influence  at 
work,  invisible,  indefinite,  incomprehensible. 

But,  happily  for  that  age,  and  for  all  ages  to  come,  the 
duties  of  the  Prophet  were  not  limited  to  this  task.  Beneath  this 
consciousness  of  a  living  judge  spying  out  his  ways,  with  the  awful 
thoughts  which  it  generates,  other  desires  discover  themselves  in 
the  mind  of  the  holy  Israelite,  which  the  teacher  is  to  educate  by 
certain  promises  and  glorious  hopes.  Through  him  man  is  to  be 
taught,  not  only  of  that  within  him  which  fears  and  trembles  before 

*  The  case  of  Elisha  may  be  considered  an  exception.  But  was  not  a  prophet  in 
Samaria  in  some  sense  a  substitute  for  the  priest,  or,  at  all  events,  a  witness  for  the 
institution  ? 


364 


SIGNS  OF  A 


God,  but  of  that  which  nothing  but  the  vision  of  God  can  satisfy. 
The  same  event  which  is  to  set  free  the  conscience,  so  far  as  its 
fears  spring  from  the  dread  of  sin,  not  the  love  of  it,  is  also  that 
which  is  to  present  these  longings  with  their  perfect  object.  The 
coming  of  the  Lamb  of  God,  who  is  to  take  away  the  sin  of  the 
world, — of  Him  who  is  to  show  men  the  Father, — this,  consequently, 
is  that  glorious  consummation  of  all  past  history,  to  which  the 
prophetic  eye  is  always  turned,  and  in  the  glories  of  which  every 
true  Israelite,  whether  still  sojourning  on  earth  or  departed  from  it, 
understands  assuredly  that  he  shall  be  a  partaker.  But  on  this  hope 
is  entailed  another,  equally  exhilarating  and  still  more  mysterious. 
The  spirit  in  man,  striving  after  this  perfect  object,  hereafter  to  be 
revealed,  feels  that  when  it  is  admitted  to  behold  him,  it  will  need 
to  be  sustained  by  a  life  proceeding  from  himself — feels  that,  if  it  is 
admitted  to  converse  with  Him,  it  will  need  the  assurance  that  He 
also  is  conversing  with  it.  An  unspeakable  communion,  a  Spirit 
witnessing  with  our  spirit,  nothing  less  than  this  can  be  the  boundary 
of  the  aspirations  which  have  been  thus  wonderfully  called  out.  The 
Prophet  meets  this  deepest  cry  of  the  inner  man  ;  and  the  promise 
of  the  Spirit  being  poured  from  above,  and  the  desert  blossoming 
with  the  rose,  is  indissolubly  linked  to  the  promise  of  a  King  who 
shall  reign  in  righteousness,  and  in  whom  the  glory  of  the  Most 
High  shall  shine  forth. 

As  the  mind  of  the  prophet  himself  rose  to  the  level  of  these 
anticipations,  it  is  impossible  but  that  he  must  have  perceived  a  dis- 
tinction between  that  spirit  in  him  which  longed  for  intercourse 
with  the  Everlasting  Spirit,  and  those  faculties  of  thought  and  ex- 
pression, by  which  he  was  able  to  impart  the  desires  and  hopes 
with  which  he  had  been  inspired,  to  other  men.  Both,  he  will  have 
felt,  are  subject  to  a  divine  impulse,  a  divine  government,  but  one  is 
in  some  sense  a  divine  faculty,  meant  for  fellowship  with  that  which 
is  divine,  not  realizing  its  own  properties  but  in  that  fellowship  ; 
the  other  is  meant  to  obey  a  motion  with  which,  strictly  speaking, 
it  cannot  sympathize.  But  the  deeper,  the  diviner  faculty,  is  the 
more  universal ;  this  belongs  to  me  as  a  man ;  this  is  the  privilege 
of  my  race  ;  the  other  is  specially  imparted  to  me  for  wise  and  gra- 
cious purposes ;  distinguishing  me  from  my  fellows ;  to  be  received 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


365 


as  an  awful  trust;  to  be  used  for  their  benefit.  Hence, in  that 
great  period  of  manifestation  to  which  he  looks  forward,  he  will, 
at  times,  have  anticipated, — first,  that  in  close  connexion  with  the 
revelation  of  Him  who  is  the  object  of  desire  to  all  nations,  there 
would  also  be  a  revelation  of  Him  who  had  been  moving  secretly 
the  hearts  and  understandings  of  men ;  next,  that  this  revelation 
would  in  some  striking  manner  be  at  once  the  assertion  of  Him  as 
holding  fellowship  with  men  universally,  and  as  bestowing  those 
special  gifts  by  which  some  men  are  qualified  to  be  the  guides  and 
teachers  of  their  brethren. 

Whether  this  anticipation  did  take  a  definite  form  in  the  minds 
of  the  Prophets  or  no,  we  can  tell  how  it  was  realized.  The  Son 
of  God  selects  his  chosen  servants,  the  heralds  of  his  kingdom,  from 
the  fishermen  of  Galilee.  With  them  he  converses  for  three  years, 
teaching  them  to  apprehend  mysteries  wrhich  had  been  kept  hid 
from  generations  ;  telling  them  that  they  were  permitted  to  see  that 
which  Kings  and  Prophets  had  not  seen  ;  in  all  his  intercourse  with 
them,  still  treating  them  as  men  destined  for  a  work — not  merely 
imparting  to  them  a  knowledge  of  truth,  but  a  method  of  commu- 
nicating it.  But,  after  the  call  which  these  disciples  had  received; 
after  the  wonderful  discipline  by  which  He  had  so  long  prepared 
them  ;  after  He  had  re-appeared  to  them  in  his  risen  form,  and 
breathed  on  them,  saying,  "  Receive  ye  the  Holy  Ghost ;"  still  He 
told  them  that  they  were  to  tarry  in  Jerusalem  t  j  receive  the  prom- 
ise of  the  Father ;  and  that  then,  and  then  only,  should  they  have 
power  from  on  high  to  perform  their  work.  As  I  have  remarked 
before,  they  were  met,  not  as  individuals,  but  as  a  college;  they 
had  formally  completed  their  number  when  this  promise  was  fulfill- 
ed. And  what  was  the  fulfillment  ?  The  deep  mystery  of  it,  I 
have  contended  before,  (herein  following  the  Church,  which  has 
fixed  Trinity  Sunday  to  follow  next  upon  Whitsunday,)  consisted  in 
the  formal  declaration  of  the  Holy  Spirit  as  a  Person,  the  assertion 
of  the  Divine  Unity  of  the  Father  and  the  Son  in  Him,  and  in  the 
establishment  of  a  Universal  Church.  But  this  is  inseparably 
connected  in  Scripture  with  the  conferring  of  powers  on  a  set  of 
men  previously  marked  out  to  be  Ministers  of  Christ.  The  call  of 
Christ  was  not  sufficient ;  here  was  a  formal  endowment  with  the 
gifts  which  Christ  had  designed  for  them  when  He  bade  them 

24 


366 


SIGNS  OF  A 


leave  their  nets,  and  which  He  had  now  received  for  them  from  on 
high. 

Signs,  we  know7,  accompanied  the  first  great  declaration  of  this 
Divine  Presence  in  the  Church.  Those  signs  were  like  the  twig  or 
clod  of  earth  which  in  ancient  feoffments  attested  the  delivery  of  a 
portion  of  land  to  a  certain  person  and  his  heirs  for  ever.  We 
should  as  little  expect  them  to  be  continually  repeated,  as  that  the 
twig  or  clod  should  be  solemnly  presented  to  the  new  possessor, 
whenever  he  performed  a  fresh  act  of  ownership.  But  the  princi- 
ple asserted  by  these  signs,  wTe  affirm  to  be  perpetual.  The  Spirit 
of  God,  by  a  wonderful  demonstration,  declares  that  He  is  dwelling 
among  men  ;  that  an  organized  body  of  men  has  been  provided  for 
his  habitation  ;  that  through  this  body  his  blessings  are  to  be  trans- 
mitted to  the  world ;  that  through  a  portion  of  this  body,  his  bless- 
ings are  to  be  transmitted  to  the  rest.  Every  thing  on  this  great 
day  of  spiritual  inspiration,  speaks  of  preparation,  order,  distinction, 
unity.  No  chance  or  casual  moment  is  selected,  but  the  period  of 
an  ancient  festival ;  no  secret  place,  but  an  upper  chamber  in  the 
temple ;  no  chance  individual,  but  men  who  have  been  for  years 
openly  preparing  for  the  work.  Whatever  system,  then,  teaches 
that  a  minister  is  not  publicly  and  openly,  and  once  for  all  endow- 
ed with  certain  powers  and  faculties  for  his  work,  these  powers 
being  sustained  within  him  by  the  constant  presence  of  Him  who 
bestows  them ;  whatever  system  conveys  the  notion,  that  the  min- 
ister, being  such  by  virtue  of  his  inward  call,  is  either  then  invested 
with  the  requisite  gifts,  or  receives  them  afterwards,  from  time  to 
time,  by  sudden  movements  and  inspirations,  we  affirm  is  essential- 
ly an  Old  Testament  system.  And  the  consequences  of  such  a  sys- 
tem must  infallibly  be  these : — The  mere  spiritual  faculty,  which  is 
awakened  in  him  by  the  voice  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  will  be  confound- 
ed with  that  Spirit  himself ;  his  personality  will  be  forgotten  in  his 
operations ;  there  will  be  a  fearful  confusion  between  the  human 
speaker  and  the  Invisible  powrer  which  speaks  in  him,  alternating 
with  a  continual  attempt  to  separate  them  ;  the  intellectual  facul- 
ties and  endowments  will  first  be  despised,  because  they  are  suppos- 
ed to  have  no  connection  with  the  Spirit ;  and  then  will  be  con- 
founded with  the  faculty  which  is  truly  divine  and  spiritual  in  man, 
when  both  are  found  to  proceed  from  the  same  source,  and  the  for- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  367 

mer  to  be  the  means  of  evoking  the  latter.  I  say,  if  we  considered 
wherein  the  Old  Testament  system  was  defective,  and  how  the 
blanks  are  filled  up  in  the  New  ;  and  then  heard  of  a  scheme  in 
which  these  blanks  were  restored,  without,  however,  a  restoration 
of  those  other  portions  of  the  old  system,  which  prevented  that  which 
was  necessarily  imperfect  from  being  evil,  we  should  look  for  all 
these  mischiefs  as  the  fruits  of  it.  And  the  actual  history  of  the 
Quakers  fulfils  every  one  of  these  predictions.  The  belief  in  the 
Personality  of  the  Spirit,  in  his  difference  from  the  spiritual  life 
which  He  originates,  has  been  that  truth  which  they  have  found  it 
most  difficult  to  realize,  and  which  has  been  continually  slipping 
away  from  them.  Their  ministers,  even  in  the  best  age  of  their  so- 
ciety, were  almost  idolized.  They  have  veered  continually  between 
contempt  for  the  intellectual  powers  generally,  and  a  vast  over- 
appreciation  of  them,  when  they  seemed  to  be  under  spiritual  guid- 
ance. And  all  these  contradictions  are  now  reaching  a  head,  and 
threatening  the  extinction  of  their  body. 

The  Presbyterian. 

We  pass  to  those  whose  objections  are  principally  and  express- 
ly against  Episcopacy.  Some  of  these  turn  upon  the  idea  of  the 
Church,  some  are  derived  from  the  letter  of  Scripture,  and  some 
are  founded  upon  experience.  The  first  take  this  form — '  Christ  is 
the  only  Bishop  of  his  Church.  All  attempts  to  substitute  another 
overseership,  for  his,  are  founded  upon  a  misconception  of  our  re- 
lation to  Him.  The  words  "  Call  no  man  your  father  upon  earth, 
for  one  is  your  Father  which  is  in  heaven,,'  though  they  do  not  in- 
terfere with  the  acknowledgment  of  spiritual  fathers  in  some  sense, 
for  St.  Paul  constantly  calls  himself  one,  do  assuredly  confound  all 
such  pretensions  to  fatherhood  as  the  Bishops  by  the  very  nature  of 
their  office  put  forth.  Assumption  and  domination,  the  very  oppo- 
site qualities  to  those  which  should  appear  in  a  ministry,  are  impli- 
ed in  the  conception  of  this  function.  And  secondly,  it  is  not  borne 
out  by  the  least  warrant  of  revelation.  That  the  word  im'axonog  is 
to  be  found  in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  no  one  will  dispute.  But 
it  is  found  in  such  connexions  as  show  that  the  officer  whom  it  de- 
notes was  not  distinguished  from  the  Presbyter — that  the  Apostles, 
at  all  events,  did  not  look  upon  the  distinction  as  in  any  wise  con- 


368 


SIGNS  OF  A 


nected  with  the  being  of  the  Church.  If  then  we  would  have  a 
Church  upon  a  scriptural  platform,  framed  according  to  Apostoli- 
cal precedent,  there  seems  little  doubt  that  Bishops  would  find  no 
place,  or  a  very  unimportant  place  in  it.  But,  thirdly,  it  may  be 
said  that  we  cannot  return  strictly  to  those  precedents,  that  the 
Church  has  a  principle  of  life  and  authority  in  itself,  and  that  we 
are  to  consider  the  way  in  which  institutions  have  actually  devel- 
oped themselves.  Very  well ;  then  look  at  all  the  cruelty, usurpa- 
tion, pride,  secularity,  which  have  been  manifested  by  these  spirit- 
ual fathers.  And  then  say,  whether  the  history  of  the  Church 
be  not  as  conclusive  a  witness  against  them  as  the  words  of  inspi- 
ration.' 

It  is  evident  that  the  objection  which  is  founded  upon  the  con- 
stitution of  the  Church,  does  not  merely  affect  the  principle  of  Epis- 
copacy. Its  application  is  very  wide  indeed.  Presbyterians  in 
general  have  perceived  that  it  strikes  at  the  notion  of  any  human 
priesthood.  If  the  fact  that  Christ  is  the  universal  Bishop,  interfere 
with  the  existence  of  earthly  Bishops,  the  fact  that  He  is  the  Priest 
of  his  Church,  of  course  makes  it  impossible  that  any  inferior  per- 
sons should  usurp  that  name.  Probably  the  last  case  will  be  felt 
to  be  stronger  than  the  first ;  at  all  events,  many  persons  are  found 
to  denounce  the  use  of  the  words  ie$w§  and  Sacerdos  in  the  Divine 
economy,  who  will  contend  stoutly  for  the  importance  of  Bishops. 
Now  I  wish  it  might  be  considered,  that  if  these  phrases  be  on  this 
ground  denied  to  the  ministers  of  the  Church,  they  must  on  the 
same  ground  be  denied  to  the  members  of  it.  The  words,  "  We 
are  made  Kings  and  Priests  unto  God,"  which  are  so  often  quoted 
to  confute  the  pretensions  of  a  particular  caste  or  ministry,  are 
themselves  profane  and  dangerous  words.  They  are  appropriating 
to  the  servant  the  acts  and  offices  which,  according  to  this  doctrine, 
exclusively  appertain  to  the  Lord.  Nor  can  the  argument  stop 
here.  There  must  be  a  careful  weeding  out  in  theological  books, 
and  above  all,  in  the  Book  of  Revelation,  of  every  phrase  which, 
being  first  used  to  describe  the  head  of  the  body,  is  afterwards  ap- 
plied to  the  body  itself,  or  to  any  of  its  members.  I  beseech  any 
one  calmly  and  seriously  to  reflect  upon  the  effect  which  such  a 
change  must  produce — I  do  not  say  in  the  dialect  of  Christianity, 
but — in  its  deepest  and  most  essential  principles.    For  surely,  if  it 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


369 


have  one  principle  which  more  essentially  belongs  to  it  than  ano- 
ther, this  is  the  one,  that  the  language  which  makes  Christ  known 
to  us,  is  the  only  language  which  can  fitly  make  the  Church  known 
to  us.  Not  merely  Catholic  divinity,  but  Puritan  divinity,  recog- 
nises the  identification  of  offices  in  Christ  and  in  his  faithful  mem- 
bers, as  involved  in  the  very  idea  of  the  Gospel.  Where,  I  ask,  is 
the  line  to  be  drawn  ? 

Whence  arises  the  propriety  of  the  doctrine,  that  the  state  of  the 
whole  Church,  and  of  each  member  of  the  Church,  is  the  image  of 
his  state  who  has  redeemed  it ;  and  the  impropriety  of  the  doctrine, 
that  every  office  in  the  Church  is  the  image  of  some  office  perform- 
ed by  Christ  in  his  own  person — is  the  means  by  that  office  present- 
ed to  men,  and  made  effectual  for  them  through  all  time  ? 

I  have  no  more  earnest  desire  than  that  the  proposition  which  I 
have  put  forward :  '  If  the  Incarnation  mean  any  thing,  if  the 
Church  be  not  a  dream,  all  offices  exercised  by  her  on  behalf  of  hu- 
manity must  be  offices  first  exercised  by  Christ'  should  be  set  side 
by  side  with  the  Presbyterian  proposition,  *  It  is  profane  and  wick- 
ed to  apply  to  ordinary  huma7i  creatures,  the  names  which  designate 
the  works  and  offices  of  Christ,1  that  each  should  be  pushed  to  its 
furthest  consequences,  and  that  each  should  be  submitted  to  the 
judgment  of  the  holiest  men  among  those  whose  educational  preju- 
dices would  lead  them  to  reject  Episcopacy.  I  have  no  fear  as  to 
the  result ;  and  I  am  quite  sure  that  a  great  collateral  advantage 
would  follow  from  this  method  of  considering  the  subject.  We 
are  constantly  asked  how  we  dare  to  lay  so  much  stress  upon  an 
outward  ordinance,  as  if  it  had  any  thing  to  do  with  the  great  essen- 
tial truths  of  the  Gospel.  Is  it  not  at  best  a  mere  outwork  of 
Christianity  ?  Our  answer  is  derived  from  this  great  Presbyterian 
argument.  That  cannot  be  a  trifle  which  involves  the  most  oppo- 
site conception  of  the  whole  order  of  the  Church  and  of  human 
society.  If  the  objection  we  have  been  considering  be  a  true  one, 
the  language  which  the  most  earnestly  religious  men  have  been 
using,  at  the  times  when  they  were  most  religious,  when  they 
were  striving  to  express  the  most  spiritual  and  fundamental  truths,  is 
inconsistent  language,  and  must  be  abandoned.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  our  principle  be  a  true  one,  it  must  be  a  question  of  the 
highest  practical  moment,  whether  the  idea  of  Christ's  Episcopacy 


370 


SIGNS  OF  A 


or  of  his  Priesthood  can  be  preserved  among  men,  when  that, 
which  upon  this  hypothesis  is  the  divine  method  for  preserving 
them,  has  been  rejected. 

2.  '  But  this  view,  however  it  may  be  defended  by  theories,  re- 
ceives no  justification  from  Scripture.'  I  admit  at  once,  that  if 
the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  were  set  before  me,  and  I  were  desired  to 
make  out  from  them  alone  wrhat  the  office  of  the  Overseer  was,  as 
distinguished  from  that  of  the  Presbyter,  I  should  decline  the  task 
as  hopeless.  Nor  do  I  think,  that  if  I  were  allowed  to  add  to  the 
hints  which  this  book  supplies,  all  that  I  could  gather  with  respect 
to  these  particular  names  from  the  Epistles,  I  should  be  much 
nearer  to  satisfaction.  My  difficulty,  I  confess,  is  to  understand 
how,  from  these  scattered  notices,  the  Presbyterian  has  been  able 
to  arrive  at  the  clear  and  satisfying  conclusion,  that  the  whole 
Church  for  thirteen  centuries,  and  the  greater  part  of  the  Church 
for  sixteen  centuries,  has  been  utterly  wrong  in  believing  that  such 
an  officer  as  the  one  who  is  understood  by  the  word  Bishop,  is 
meant  to  exist  in  it.  I  should  be  sorry  upon  such  evidence  to  con- 
demn the  very  paltriest  ceremony  which  could  allege  a  similar  pre- 
scription in  its  favour.  Of  course,  therefore,  I  should  be  equally 
sorry  to  put  in  such  evidence  as  supplying  the  original  title-deed  of 
the  institution.  For,  were  there  no  other,  I  should  scarcely  know 
how  to  state  the  question  which  is  to  be  settled.  The  Presbyterian 
would  not  allow  me  to  word  it  thus :  '  Did  there  exist  in  the  time 
of  the  Apostles  an  order  of  priests  distinct  from  that  of  Bish- 
ops V  for  he  does  not  admit  that  there  is  an  order  of  priests  any 
more  than  one  of  Bishops,  nor  should  I  be  at  all  anxious  to  ascer- 
tain how  soon  the  functions  which  I  attribute  to  the  priest  became 
separated  from  those  which  I  suppose  belong  to  the  Bishop.  The 
only  point,  therefore,  which  could  be  brought  into  debate,  would 
be  whether  the  word  iniaxonog  always  means  in  the  language  of 
the  New  Testament,  the  pastor  of  a  number  of  congregations,  and 
the  word  nQta^vtEQog  always  means,  in  the  same  language,  the 
pastor  of  one ;  a  question  which  I  should  be  inclined  to  answer  in 
the  negative.  But  when  I  turn  again  to  these  Acts  and  these 
Epistles,  I  find  a  name  which  puzzles  me  much  more  than  either  of 
these ;  one  which  meets  me  at  every  turn,  one  which  is  implied  in 
every  sentence  of  them,  one  of  which  I  must  get  a  solution  some- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


371 


where  if  I  can.  What  manner  of  people  are  these  Apostles  whose 
acts  are  recorded  in  the  work  of  St.  Luke,  whose  letters  are  pre- 
served for  the  perpetual  instruction  of  the  Church  1  It  may  be 
answered,  'They  were  the  persons  selected  by  our  Lord  to  be  with 
Him  in  his  temptations  while  He  was  upon  earth,  and  to  bear  wit- 
ness of  his  resurrection  after  He  had  left  the  world.'  No  doubt 
these  were  the  functions  of  the  first  twelve  disciples.  The  Incar- 
nation of  Christ  was  to  be  the  ground  of  the  new  kingdom  ;  it  was 
needful  that  there  should  be  persons  who  had  seen  and  handled  the 
word  of  life.  About  this  matter  there  is  no  dispute.  The  question 
is,  first,  whether  the  fruits  of  the  Incarnation  ceased  with  the  time 
when  our  Lord  left  the  world,  or  whether  they  only  began  to 
show  themselves ;  next,  whether  the  form  which  Christ  himself 
gave  to  the  infant  kingdom,  was  the  form  which  it  was  to  retain 
through  all  the  future  circumstances  of  its  development;  and 
therefore,  3rdly,  whether  the  office  of  the  Apostles  was  to  be  de- 
funct when  the  particular  circumstances  which  made  the  name  ap- 
propriate had  ceased  to  exist.  If  the  apostleship  were  inseparably 
connected  with  its  first  accidents,  it  would  seem  strange  that  St. 
Paul,  whose  calling  was  of  an  altogether  different  kind  from  that 
of  the  twelve,  who  had  not  been  with  our  Lord  during  his  stay 
upon  earth,  who  was  expressly  a  witness  of  that  state  of  glory  in 
which  we  believe  that  Christ  is  now,  as  much  as  when  He  stopped 
the  persecutor  on  the  way  to  Damascus,  should  have  so  eagerly 
asserted  for  himself  the  position  and  the  powers  of  an  Apostle.  It 
would  seem  strange,  too,  that  those  powers,  in  virtue  of  which  the 
other  Apostles  were  able  to  go  forth  witnessing  of  their  Master's 
resurrection,  were  not  those  which  they  derived  from  Him  while 
He  was  upon  earth,  not  those  even  which  they  received  from  Him 
immediately  after  his  resurrection,  but  were  those  which  came 
upon  them  after  He  had  gone  out  of  the  sight  of  men,  and  was  as- 
cended on  high  that  He  might  fill  all  things.  The  question,  there- 
fore, to  be  decided  when  this  evidence  is  brought  before  us,  is  sim- 
ply whether  there  was  or  was  not  to  be  continued  in  the  Church, 
any  office  corresponding  in  its  essential  characteristics  to  that  one 
which  we  judge  from  the  New  Testament  to  be  the  distinguishing 
one  of  the  Church  at  its  foundation.  The  common  opinion  is, 
that  by  the  perpetuation  of  this  office  the  Church  has  been  per- 


372 


SIGNS  OF  A 


petuated  ;  the  connexion  of  different  ages  with  each  other  realized ; 
the  wholeness  and  unity  of  the  body  declared.  The  changes 
which  have  taken  place  in  the  condition  of  this  office  we  suppose 
to  be  changes  as  to  name,  as  to  the  number  of  the  persons  feeling 
it,  as  to  the  limits  of  their  government ;  changes,  some  of  them 
presupposed  in  the  very  existence  of  a  body  which  was  to  have  an 
unlimited  expansion  ;  none  of  them  affecting  its  nature  or  its  ob- 
ject. The  Presbyterian  says  that  no  institution  of  the  kind  does 
exist  in  the  Church  ;  that  is  to  say,  that  the  platform  of  the  Church 
in  the  present  day  is  not  the  apostolic  platform.  Yet  he  says  this  in 
the  same  breath  with  which  he  protests  against  our  departure  from 
the  simplicity  of  the  New  Testament  practice,  and  calls  upon  us  to 
abandon  all  ecclesiastical  precedents  for  the  sake  of  conforming 
to  it. 

3.  One  of  the  main  reasons  which  he  gives  for  this  exhortation, 
is  the  gross  corruption  and  secularity  which  have  been  the  result  of 
the  Episcopal  system  wherever  it  has  been  established.  I  neither 
meet  this  charge  by  saying  that  there  is  no  foundation  for  it,  nor 
by  special  pleading  the  instances  which  are  brought  forward  in 
support  of  it ;  nor  by  resorting  to  the  seldom  satisfactory  common- 
place, that  the  abuse  of  an  institution  is  no  argument  against  its 
use.  I  might  with  far  more  reason  and  success  produce  the  facts, 
which  prove  that  in  nearly  every  case  in  which  the  Church  has 
enlarged  her  borders,  in  which  the  commission,  "  Go  ye  into  all 
nations"  has  been  really  acted  out,  Bishops  have  been  the  instru- 
ments of  fulfilling  the  command  and  obtaining  the  promise.  But 
I  would  rather  place  the  argument  on  another  ground  :  I  would 
undertake  to  show,  and  I  would  go  through  all  ecclesiastical  history 
in  support  of  the  position,  that  the  secularity  of  Bishops  has  been 
in  all  cases  the  effect  of  their  not  believing  in  the  dignity  and 
divinity  of  their  own  ordination ;  and  the  assumption  of  any  par- 
ticular Bishop  has  always  been  the  effect  of  his  denying  the  dignity 
and  effect  of  his  brethren's  ordination.  You  show  me  a  Bishop 
who  is  in  all  respects  a  splendid  feudal  lord,  with  his  hounds  and 
his  falcons — his  sumptuous  table— his  armed  retrainers.  Well !  I 
see  a  man  who  feels  about  his  office,  just  as  you  do,  that  it  carries 
with  it  no  divine  authority  ;  that  he  is  under  no  responsibility  for 
the  exercise  of  it  except  to  the  class  in  which  he  moves,  and  to  the 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


373 


civil  power  which  has  added  certain  honours  to  it.  My  wish  is  to 
cure  him  of  the  habit  of  feeling  which  you  would  rivet  in  him. 
But  you  will  say,  perhaps, 1  were  he  a  Christian  minister  he  would 
not  be  tempted  to  this  secularly.' — What  do  you  mean  by  such 
words  1  Do  you  mean  that  he  would  not  be  tempted  to  any  seculari- 
ty — that  the  parochial  clergyman,  comfortably  settled  in  his  manse, 
has  not  the  temptation  to  sink  into  the  habits  of  an  ordinary  mem- 
ber of  the  middle  class— that  the  mendicant  friar,  or  the  itinerant 
Protestant  preacher,  is  not  liable  to  be  infected  by  the  set  to  whom 
he  ministers,  and  by  whom  he  obtains  his  livelihood  ?  You  cannot 
say  this  without  outraging  the  authority  of  Scripture  and  the  wit- 
ness of  experience.  Secularity  of  some  kind, — (of  what  kind  the 
character  of  the  age,  of  the  man,  of  his  company  determines,) 
has  assailed,  and  must  always  assail  every  man  in  this  world ;  and 
I  believe  there  is  no  deliverance  from  it  for  any  man,  but  in  the 
belief  that  he  has  a  vocation.  Whether  it  is  in  accordance  or 
not  with  the  order  of  Providence,  that  the  ministers  of  Christ's 
flock  should  be  also  ministers  of  the  nation,  and  that  each  class 
of  the  nation  should  feel  the  influence  of  some  one  of  its  classes, 
I  shall  consider  in  a  future  section.  On  the  subject  of  Episcopal 
assumption,  I  need  only  refer  to  the  history  of  popes  and  partriarchs 
for  a  proof,  that  the  occasion  of  it  is  ever  an  exaltation  of  some 
advantage  of  place  or  circumstance  connected  with  the  order  above 
the  order  itself. 

Objections  to  an  absolving  power  in  ministers. 

I  have  said  that  the  main  principle  of  the  Presbyterian  argu- 
ment is  as  directly  opposed  to  the  idea  of  a  priesthood  as  it  is  to 
the  idea  of  Episcopacy.  In  dealing  with  the  one  question,  then,  1 
have  implicitly  discussed  the  other.  Moreover,  the  doctrine  of  a 
priesthood  is  so  much  involved  with  the  doctrine  of  sacrifice,  that 
my  last  section  may  be  looked  upon  as  a  sufficient  statement  of  my 
views  respecting  it.  Still  there  is  so  much  horror  in  many  minds 
of  that  absolving  power  which  I  have  attributed  to  the  Christian 
Bishop  and  to  those  whom  he  endows  with  it,  and  their  complaints 
involve  consequences  of  so  practical  a  character,  that  I  think  I 
should  be  wrong  not  to  give  them  a  separate  consideration.  I  do 
not  class  them  under  the  head  of  Presbyterian  objections,  because 


374 


SIGNS  OF  A 


there  are  many  Episcopalians  who  appear  to  share  in  them.  They 
may  be  expressed  thus  : 

'  According  to  St.  Paul,  those  who  believe  in  Christ  are  justified 
from  all  things  from  which  they  could  not  be  justified  by  the  Law 
of  Moses.  Ambassadors  are  sent  forth  to  declare  Christ's  Gospel 
to  men,  in  order  that  they  may  not  be  prevented  from  believing  by 
the  want  of  hearing  ;  in  order  that  if  they  believe  they  may  re- 
ceive this  justification  and  freedom  of  the  conscience.  This  is  the 
true  office  of  the  minister  ;  all  these  are  accidental  and  subordinate 
to  it.  He  may  own  orders  and  governments  in  the  Church,  Pres- 
byterian, Episcopal,  Apostolical,  what  you  will ;  but  the  preaching 
of  Christ  is  his  true  and  essential  function  :  his  commission  is  to  do 
this,  this  first,  this  above  all  things.  When  he  pretends  that  he 
has  some  other  way  of  relieving  the  conscience  than  this ;  when  he 
says  that  he  has  the  power  of  pardoning  and  absolving, — that  he 
may  pronounce  men  free  from  their  sins, — he  is  not  only  committing 
a  fearful  usurpation  upon  the  rights  of  Christ,  he  is  actually  mis- 
understanding and  denying  the  true  character  of  his  own  office. 
He  deprives  himself  of  his  true  power,  in  his  eagerness  to  grasp  a 
power  which  has  never  been  given  him  by  God,  and  can  never  be 
of  the  least  use  to  man.' 

There  is  one  point  which  is  very  important  to  take  notice  of  in 
reference  to  this  subject.  According  to  the  idea  which  has  always 
existed  in  the  Christian  Church,  the  same  person  to  whom  the 
function  of  absolving  is  committed  has  also  the  function  of  ad- 
ministering the  Eucharist.  These  two  duties  never  have  been 
separated,  and  it  is  most  needful  that  they  should  be  contemplated 
in  their  relation  to  each  other ;  for  if  the  Eucharist  be  that  act  in 
which  the  worshipper  is  especially  brought  into  direct  communion 
with  his  Lord,  that  act  in  which  the  mere  human  and  visible  agent 
is  most  entirely  lost  and  forgotten,  or  only  contemplated  as  one  who 
bears  witness  that  He  whom  he  serves  is  a  living  and  actual  person, 
we  must  suppose  that  this  is  a  key  to  the  whole  character  of  the 
office,  in  whatever  way  it  may  be  exercised.  If,  again,  the  Eucharist 
involve  at  once  a  confession  of  sins  on  the  part  of  the  receivers,  a 
thankful  acknowledgment  of  a  state  of  fellowship  and  blessedness 
with  their  Lord,  into  which  they  have  been  brought,  though  they 
may  have  walked  most  unworthily  of  it,  the  acceptance  of  a  pledge 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


375 


of  forgiveness  for  the  past,  strength  for  the  present— a  strength  only 
to  be  realized  by  union  with  the  invisible  Lord, — a  promise  of  future 
blessings,  to  be  attained  in  the  same  way  and  in  no  other,  this  would 
seem  to  determine  the  nature  of  that  particular  function  which  the 
minister  presumes  to  exercise  when  he  pronounces  absolution.  His 
whole  object  is  to  present  Christ  to  men  and  men  to  Christ  really 
and  practically.  Suppose  him  in  the  congregation,  he  is  there  to 
represent  its  unity,  to  offer  before  God  as  a  whole  body,  to  confess 
the  sins  which  its  members  have  committed  by  separating  them- 
selves from  the  body.  Then  he  is  a  witness  of  Christ's  continual 
intercession  for  the  entire  Church.  •  Suppose  him  alone,  with  any 
particular  member  of  the  congregation,  he  is  with  him  to  preserve 
him  in  the  unity  of  the  Church,  to  present  before  God  his  tears  and 
contrition  for  having  lived  unworthy  of  his  position  in  it.  Then 
he  is  a  witness  of' Christ's  distinct  intercession  for  every  member 
of  his  flock.  But  still  this  can  be  but  half  his  duty.  The  incar- 
nation means  very  little,  the  kingdom  of  God  is  a  mere  delusion,  if 
there  be  not  a  voice  speaking  from  heaven  as  well  as  one  crying 
from  earth  ;  if  the  one  be  not  an  answer  to  the  other,  if  the  minis- 
ter may  not  say  to  the  congregation,  4  God  has  heard  your  petitions, 
rise  up  as  pardoned  men,  with  strength  to  offer  up  praises  and 
prayers,  with  strength  to  do  your  work,'  the  confession  is  but  half 
real — the  Gospel  is  not  real  at  all.  And  if  he  may  not  say  in  like 
manner  to  the  sick  and  solitary  penitent,  God  accepts  thy  tears  and 
pardons  thy  sin,  I  do  not  see  what  he  means  by  saying  that  he  has 
authority  to  preach  forgiveness  of  sins.  He  preaches  forgiveness 
to  those  who  will  accept  it,  understanding  its  nature  and  purpose ; 
receiving  it  not  as  a  license  to  the  conscience,  but  as  a  deliverance 
of  it.  He  delivers  forgiveness  under  precisely  the  same  conditions. 
How  many  of  the  congregation  are  in  a  state  of  mind  to  claim 
their  fellowship  with  Christ  and  each  other,  and  so  to  take  the  mercy 
which  is  freely  given  them — whether  the  individual  man  can  do 
this — God  only  knows.  The  absolver  at  all  events  has  spoken  the 
truth  ;  he  has  acted  out  his  commission  ;  the  rest  he  must  leave.  His 
public  preaching,  his  private  exhortations,  are  all  intended  to  remove 
some  stumbling-block  out  of  the  way  of  those  to  whom  he  has  been 
sent ;  to  explain  to  them  the  meaning  of  their  confession  and  of 
his  absolution ;  to  prevent  their  offering  the  one,  or  receiving 


376 


SIGNS  OF  A 


the  other  in  vain  ;  to  hinder  them  from  turning  either  to  an  evil 
account. 

Supposing  this  to  be  the  case,  it  would  seem  that  there  is  no 
greater  peril  in  this  doctrine,  than  in  the  one  which  makes  preach- 
ing the  main  work  and  office  of  a  minister.  As  to  misconstruction, 
there  is,  at  all  events,  no  greater  likelihood  of  it  in  the  case  of 
words  which  are  not  our  own,  which  are  spoken  in  the  name  of 
God,  and  on  the  most  solemn  occasion,  than  in  the  case  of  words 
which,  under  whatever  teaching  from  above,  we  have  composed, 
which  must  be  mixed  with  our  own  peculiar  modes  of  expression 
and  habits  of  thought.  So  much  I  think  must  be  admitted  by 
every  one,  who  considers  the  subject  without  prejudice.  And  the 
question  which  such  a  person  might  be  inclined  to  ask,  would  per- 
haps be  this :  *  Where  is  the  great  difference  1  You  mean  by 
your  absolving  power  just  what  others  mean  by  preaching  the 
Gospel.  Let  this  be  clearly  understood,  and  then  no  Christian 
would  object  to  your  statements  any  longer.'  My  answer  is,  I 
cannot  make  this  explanation,  because  it  would  not  be  a  true  one. 
I  do  conceive,  there  is  very  great  difference  between  the  notion 
that  the  act  of  absolution  which  the  minister  pronounces  in  the 
name  of  the  Church  is  that  act  which  interprets  the  object  of  his 
preaching,  and  the  notion  that  he  is  sent  to  preach,  and  that  be- 
cause he  preaches,  he  may,  in  a  certain  sense,  absolve.  The  differ- 
ence seems  to  me  to  be  this ;  in  the  former  case  the  minister  pre- 
sents Christ  actually  and  personally  to  his  congregation.  His  office 
is  a  witness  of  Christ's  presence  among  them,  of  Christ's  relation 
to  them.  It  is  grounded  on  the  acknowledgment  of  an  actual  union 
between  the  body  and  its  Head.  In  the  other  case  there  is  much 
speech,  it  may  be  eloquent,  it  may  be  true  speech,  about  Christ, 
his  work,  and  his  offices.    But  it  is 

a  painted  ship 
Upon  a  painted  ocean  j 

a  description  of  what  is  very  good  and  beautiful,  and  what  man 
wants,  but  not  the  thing  itself,  not  the  reality.  I  appeal  to  the 
history  of  modern  preaching  whether  this  be  not  the  case,  and  to 
the  complaints  of  men  in  all  directions,  whether  it  is  not  felt  to  be 
the  case.    And  if  so  it  must  be  a  serious  question  in  what  way 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


377 


those  ends  may  be  best  accomplished,  which  I  fully  believe  that 
the  objectors  I  am  now  addressing  sincerely  desire,  the  end  of 
bringing  men  more  directly  in  contact  with  the  true  and  unseen 
Absolver;  the  end  of  making  his  ministers  understand  that  they 
are  nothing  except  as  representatives  of  Him,  that  they  do  nothing, 
except  as  they  lead  men  to  the  knowledge  of  Him.  Let  it  be 
considered  patiently  and  calmly,  whether  a  priest,  who  habitually 
believes,  that  as  he  may  confess  in  the  people's  name,  so  he  may 
absolve  in  Christ's  name,  must  not  have  a  humbler  sense  of  his 
own  insignificance,  a  greater  confidence  in  an  invisible  kingdom, 
a  more  serious  conviction  that  all  men  are  meant  to  be  members  of 
it,  than  one  who  believes  that  he  has  ever  so  many  gifts,  merely- 
bestowed  for  the  purpose  of  enabling  him  to  announce  the  message 
of  salvation.  And  do  we  not  find,  in  fact,  that  the  best  of  those 
men,  whose  education  and  theories  would  induce  them  to  adopt  the 
latter  opinion,  have  been  led  in  practical  life,  in  the  conduct  and 
discipline  of  their  flocks,  in  their  intercourse  with  them  as  well  as 
in  their  discourses  to  them,  to  act  upon  the  former  ? 

The  followers  of  Mr.  Irving. 

Out  of  the  heart  of  Presbyterianism  have  arisen  a  class  of  per- 
sons, whose  objections  to  our  Episcopacy  assume  the  most  opposite 
form  possible  to  that  which  we  were  just  now  considering.  A  few 
words  respecting  this  modern  development  of  ecclesiastical  feeling- 
will  throw  great  light  upon  the  whole  subject. 

In  answering  the  Quaker  argument  respecting  the  relation  of 
the  Old  to  the'New  Testament  ministry,  I  have  maintained  the  idea 
of  ministerial  Succession  to  be  one  which  is  justified  by  the  analogy 
of  God's  dealings,  and  which  has  not  been  made  obsolete  by  any 
of  the  new  conditions  which  the  Gospel  dispensation  has  intro- 
duced. The  difference  in  the  mode  of  presenting  or  manifesting 
the  idea  seems  to  be  clearly  determined  by  the  difference  between 
a  national  and  a  universal  kingdom;  the  hereditary  tradition,  ac- 
companied with  a  solemn  consecration,  expresses  the  character  of 
the  one :  make  consecration  the  substance  of  the  tradition,  and 
abolish  the  family  limitation,  we  have  the  true  nature  of  the  other. 
This  conclusion  is  so  obvious,  and  has  been  so  much  assumed  in  the 
history  of  Christendom,  that  there  would  seem  to  be  no  occasion 


378 


SIGNS  OF  A 


for  disputing  about  it,  except  with  those  who,  like  the  Quakers, 
reject  outward  ordination  altogether.  Admit  ordination,  and  you 
admit  the  principle  of  succession ;  you  admit  the  improbability  of 
that  succession  having  been,  in  any  important  instance,  infringed 
by  those  who  habitually  recognised  it ;  at  all  events,  you  admit 
that  the  onus  probandi  lies  upon  those  who  allege  such  an  infringe- 
ment, to  show  when  it  took  place  and  wherein  it  consisted. 

This,  I  say,  would  be  the  natural  state  of  the  argument,  suppos- 
ing no  other  consideration  to  intervene.    But  those  who  had  aban- 

o 

doned  Episcopacy  by  degree  felt  that  a  great  link — if  my  view  of 
Episcopacy  as  the  great  bond  of  a  Christendom  life  be  the  correct 
one,  the  great  link — between  them  and  the  older  Church  had  been 
cut  off.  They  were  therefore  much  more  concerned  than  their 
fathers,  who  were  not  equally  conscious  of  this  severance,  could  be, 
to  prove,  first,  that  there  was  some  flaw  in  the  idea  of  succession 
as  it  obtained  among  Episcopalians  generally  ;  secondly,  that  they 
possessed  some  adequate  substitute  for  this  idea.  The  flaw  was 
easily  found.  The  whole  Church,  to  say  the  least  from  the  time  of 
Hildebrand,  but  most  likely  from  a  much  earlier  time,  down  to  the 
Reformation,  had  been,  with  the  exception  of  a  few  witnesses  in 
the  valleys  of  Piedmont,  a  popish  and  corrupt  Church;  through 
the  Bishops  of  this  Church  and  no  other  the  transmission  of  powers 
and  gifts  must  have  come  to  those  who  claimed  them  in  later  days. 
But  secondly,  it  was  said  that  the  reformed  bodies  had  lost  nothing 
by  the  breach  of  formal  ministerial  connexion  with  the  first  ages, 
seeing  that  they  had  preserved  the  really  important  succession  ; 
they  had  inherited  the  pure  apostolical  doctrine. 

Now  just  so  long  as  men  could  calmly  acquiesce  in  the  notion 
that  Christians  form  a  sect  professing  certain  sound  opinions,  more 
probable  and  more  useful  than  those  of  Mahomet  or  of  Confu- 
cius,— just  so  long  as  this  notion  was  felt  to  correspond  with  the 
descriptions  which  our  Lord  and  the  Apostles  give  of  the  purposes 
for  which  they  came  into  the  world — these  two  statements  seemed 
reasonable  and  satisfactory.  It  was  nothing  strange  that  the  sect 
should  almost  cease  for  a  time,  or  be  only  preserved  in  a  few  men, 
about  whose  very  names  there  is  great  confusion,  about  whose  opin- 
ions and  practices  a  much  greater ;  nothing  strange  that  identity 
of  opinions,  (though  it  might  be  somewhat  hard  to  establish  in  a 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


379 


court  of  law  the  identity  of  the  dogmas  of  the  New  Testament, 
with  those  which  prevailed  in  Scotland  and  Germany  during  the 
eighteenth  century,)  should  be  received  as  the  one  sign  that  the 
sect  had  reappeared.  But  the  moment  any  one  was  awakened  to 
the  fact  that  the  Gospel  spoke  of  a  kingdom — a  kingdom  actually 
to  be  set  up  among  men, — they  became  exceedingly  perplexed. 
At  first  it  was  easy  to  treat  these  words  as  bslonging  to  the  future, 
as  pointing  to  that  which  shall  be  after  a  second  appearing  of  our 
Lord,  not  to  that  which  was  the  effect  of  his  Incarnation  and  As- 
cension. But  there  was  much  which  could  not  bear  this  construc- 
tion ;  and  supposing  there  was  to  be  a  Church  in  the  world  at  all 
between  the  first  and  second  advent,  it  must  be  something  answer- 
ing to  these  words,  it  could  not  be  something  wholly  different  in 
kind  from  that  which  they  set  forth.  But  a  sect  professing  certain 
dogmas,  would  be  something  wholly  different  in  kind  from  the 
Church  therein  spoken  of.  There  was  still  an  escape  to  the  idea 
of  a  purely  spiritual  body,  but  that  escape  was  fairly  open  only  to 
the  Quakers,  and  with  them  the  Presbyterians  had  no  sympathy. 
They  had  admitted  an  organization ;  they  had  said  the  spiritual 
life  of  the  Church  ought  to  express  itself  through  this  organiza- 
tion ;  they  had  looked  upon  the  ministry  as  forming  an  indispen- 
sable part  of  it ;  they  had  constantly  referred  to  the  Scriptures  as 
exhibiting  the  model  and  idea  of  the  Church's  constitution. 

Pressed  by  these  difficulties,  the  late  Mr.  Irving,  in  his  com- 
mentary on  the  Book  of  Revelation,  betook  himself  to  the  belief 
that  the  Kirk  of  Scotland  had  preserved  a  succession  of  ministers 
in  its  Presbytery  ;  at  the  same  time  maintaining,  as  stoutly  as  any 
one  of  his  countrymen  could,  that  a  human  Episcopacy  is  incom- 
patible with  the  idea  of  Christ's  universal  lordship.  But  it  could 
not  escape  a  person  of  so  much  reflection  and  honesty  as  Mr.  Irving, 
first,  that  whatever  succession  of  a  ministerial  kind  had  been  fore- 
told in  the  Scriptures,  or  believed  in  any  age  of  the  Church,  was 
an  Apostolical  succession ;  that  is  to  say,  a  succession  of  persons 
possessing  the  essential  part  of  the  Apostolical  functions.  And  it 
was  equally  clear,  that  by  his  own  argument  he  denied  the  descent 
of  any  such  function  upon  the  Scotch  ministers.  His  position, 
therefore,  could  not  be  long  tenable,  and  either  Mr.  Irving  himself 
or  certainly  his  followers,  soon  abandoned  it  for  another.  They 


380 


SIGNS  OF  A 


admitted,  to  a  certain  extent,  the  truth  and  validity  of  the  Episcopal 
succession  which  had  been  in  the  Church  hitherto  ;  they  admitted, 
at  any  rate,  the  importance  of  the  idea  of  such  a  succession ;  but 
they  said  that  something  was  yet  wanting,  and  had  been  wanting 
ever  since  the  first  ages,  to  give  the  Church  its  true  completeness  : 
v'z.  a  distinct  order  of  Apostles,  who  should  either  supersede  the 
present  order  of  Bishops,  or,  at  least,  to  whom  they  should  do  hom- 
age, and  from  whom  they  should  derive  their  authority. 

NowT  setting  aside  all  questions  which  are  merely  collateral  to 
this  doctrine,  as  to  the  way  in  which  the  persons  of  these  Apostles 
are  to  be  ascertained,  &c,  the  reader  will  see  at  once  how  much 
plausibility  there  must  be  in  it,  to  men  in  the  state  of  mind  I  have 
described.  They  have  been  taught  that  the  Church  for  many  cen- 
turies was  in  a  kind  of  abeyance  ;  they  know  from  experience  that 
no  part  of  it  is  in  a  right  condition  now;  they  think  that  the  faults 
they  see  are  faults  arising  from  disorganization  ;  if  they  can  dis- 
cover a  defect  of  organization  which  has  existed  from  the  very  first 
ages,  how  easily  are  these  facts  explained,  how  evident  the  origin 
of  them  !  In  like  manner,  the  habit  which  they  have  received  from 
their  instructors,  of  looking  to  the  Scriptures  as  the  true  guides  to 
all  notions  respecting  the  nature  of  the  Church  ;  and  the  conviction 
which  they  have  acquired  in  their  maturer  years,  that  the  Scrip- 
tures derive  their  explanation  from  the  history  of  the  Church,  are 
by  this  hypothesis  reconciled.  They  do  homage  to  the  plain  letter 
of  Scripture,  and  yet  it  is  a  letter  wrhich  means  nothing  except  in 
reference  to  the  progress  of  Christ's  kingdom.  Thus,  too,  they  are 
able  to  connect  the  idea  of  a  restoration  of  spiritual  life  and  spirit- 
ual gifts  to  the  Church,  with  the  strongest  recognition  of  its  organic 
and  visible  character.  When  there  are  such  inward  reasons  for 
acquiescence  in  this  faith,  there  is  little  use  in  making  assaults  upon 
its  outworks.  Men  are  not  likely  to  be  laughed  out  of  an  opinion 
which  seems  to  bring  all  their  other  thoughts  into  harmony,  merely 
by  being  told  that  they  are  paying  a  superstitious  homage  to  the 
number  twelve,  or  that  the  sudden  recovery  of  an  apostolic  order 
after  an  intermission  of  eighteen  centuries  is  most  improbable. 
They  will  say,  in  answer  to  the  first  objection,  that  even  if  there 
be  no  meaning  and  mystery  in  numbers,  they  have  the  warrant  of 
Scripture  for  attaching  this  number  to  this  particular  case.  And 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


381 


in  answer  to  the  second,  they  will  say  that  if  it  be  the  purpose  of 
God  to  uphold  his  Church  in  the  world,  and  to  heal  the  breaches 
in  it,  they  think  it  reasonable  to  believe  that  He  will,  by  any  means 
or  by  any  interference,  renew  that  which  seems  indispensable  to  it. 

Nor  can  I  help  perceiving  that  the  arguments  by  which  Epis- 
copacy and  Episcopal  succession  are  sometimes  defended,  have  a 
tendency  to  strengthen  these  convictions.  As  Presbyterians  have 
been  the  persons  with  whom  writers  on  this  subject  have  chiefly 
held  controversy,  they  have  in  a  manner  assumed  the  existence  of 
two  orders  in  the  Church,  and  tried,  by  such  means  as  they  had,  to 
prove  that  a  third  was  also  necessary.  Now  this  method  of  resolv- 
ing the  Church  ministry  into  deacons  and  presbyters  plus  an  epis- 
copate, must  certainly  leave  an  impression  on  the  mind  of  any 
careful  student  of  the  New  Testament,  that  this  episcopate  can 
have  no  close  connexion  with  that  apostolic  order  which  is  evi- 
dently the  root  of  all  others,  and  in  which  they  all  originally  dwelt. 
Again,  from  certain  ways  of  speaking  respecting  the  Episcopal 
succession  which  have  been  prevalent  among  us,  the  feeling  has 
certainly  been  communicated  to  many  minds  that  it  is  necessary, 
because  the  first  Apostles  had  an  ordination  from  Christ  himself, 
and  because  the  effect,  or  a  certain  portion  of  the  effect  of  that 
ordination  has  communicated  itself  through  a  series  of  hands  to 
those  who  represent  them  in  later  ages.  I  do  not  say  that  any 
defender  of  the  succession  would  state  the  reason  for  it  in  this  form, 
but  certainly  the  contemners  of  it  must  suppose  that  this  is  intend- 
ed ;  otherwise  they  would  not  resort  to  their  jokes  about  a  virus 
which  must  have  lost  its  power  by  repeated  inoculations,  or  about 
gifts  which  must  have  been  spoiled  through  the  unclean  hands  that 
have  transmitted  them.  And  supposing  such  a  feeling  in  any  de- 
gree to  prevail,  we  can  conceive  how  utterly  shocking  it  must  be 
to  men  whose  belief  is  that  Christ  is  still  present  in  the  Church, 
and  that  He  wTould  still  communicate  actual  powers  to  his  ministers 
if  their  faithlessness  did  not  interfere. 

But  supposing  it  were  calmly  represented  to  those  who  have 
adopted  this  theory,  that,  according  to  the  doctrine  which  has  al- 
ways prevailed  in  the  Church,  the  episcopate  does  contain  in  it  the 
administration  of  the  sacraments,  the  delivery  of  absolution,  the 
preaching  of  the  Gospel,  the  ministering  to  the  sick  and  poor — all 

25 


382  SIGNS  OF  A 

the  functions,  in  short,  which  were  at  any  time  committed  by  our 
Lord  to  his  immediate  disciples ;  and  that  the  Bishops  have,  and 
ought  to  believe  they  have,  all  needful  'powers  for  performing  these 
functions :  secondly,  that  their  connexion  with  previous  ages  and 
with  the  first  Apostles  is  maintained  expressly  as  a  witness  of  the 
permanent  constitution  of  the  Church,  and  therefore  of  the  continued 
abiding  of  Christ  in  it,  and  of  each  Bishop  in  each  age  being  his 
servant  and  the  receiver  of  gifts  and  powers  directly  from  Him — 
they  may  begin  perhaps  to  view  the  whole  subject  somewhat  dif- 
ferently. They  may  examine  somewhat  more  carefully  into  the 
grounds  upon  which  they  have  rested  their  belief  of  a  super-epis- 
copal order,  and  if  they  should  be  convinced  that  any  charm  which 
there  may  have  been  in  the  number  of  the  Apostles  had  reference 
to  their  Jewish  position,  and  was  broken  by  the  act  of  Christ  him- 
self when  he  called  Paul  to  the  same  dignity,  and  through  him 
destroyed  the  middle  wall  between  Jews  and  Gentiles;  that  it  was, 
at  least,  more  likely,  a  priori,  that  an  office  which  had  been  estab- 
lished with  so  much  solemnity  would  be  upheld  by  divine  power, 
than  that  it  would  be  destroyed  by  human  unbelief ;  that  in  all 
other  cases  unbelief  displays  itself  in  doubting  and  denying  the 
existence  of  powers,  and  mistaking  the  character  of  a  function 
actually  possessed  ;  that  such  unbelief  will  account  for  all  the 
painful  phenomena  which  the  history  of  the  episcopate  presents ; 
they  may  ask  themselves  with  some  anxiety,  whether  there  be  any 
reason  to  expect  that  an  order  will  be  introduced  by  signs  and 
wonders  which  seems  to  be  already  in  being,  whether  there  be  any 
thing  to  justify  them  in  standing  aloof  from  the  body  of  Christ's 
universal  Church,  and  in  not  submitting  to  those  wThom  He  has 
himself  placed  over  it. 

The  Philosophical  Objector. 

Between  this  class  of  reasoners,  and  the  one  with  whom  I  am 
next  to  engage,  there  seems  to  be  not  one  point  of  mutual  under- 
standing. The  modern  rationalistic  philosopher  admits  that  the 
word  *  priest,'  is  one  which  contains  much  historical  significance; 
nay,  which  even  yet  is  not  obsolete,  and  may  have  a  good  mean- 
ing. '  The  error  which  men  generally  commit  in  this,  as  in  all 
other  cases,  is  that  they  do  not  distinguish  between  the  essential 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


383 


truth  and  the  fleeting  applications  of  the  word,  that  they  do  not  see 
wherein  the  real  and  valuable  power  of  the  priest  consisted,  and 
who  inherit  that  power  in  our  day*.  Churchmen  boast,  it  is  said, 
that  priests  were  the  conservators  of  letters,  and  that  they  led  men 
into  the  belief  of  a  government  which  is  not  outward  but  inward, 
not  over  the  body  but  over  the  mind.  True,  they  did  so ;  and  for 
this  we  are  to  remember  them  with  gratitude.  But  they  who  pos- 
sess their  name,  and  pretend  to  a  formal  succession  from  them, 
have  no  such  influence ;  they  do  not  preserve  science  or  letters, 
they  are  afraid  of  both ;  they  are  anxious  only  to  keep  up  their 
religious  system.  The  real  men  of  letters  and  of  science,  those 
who  make  us  feel  what  are  the  bonds  of  spiritual  intercourse  be- 
tween persons  of  different  nations  and  kindreds,  those  who  lead  us 
to  the  apprehension  of  fixed  laws — these  are  the  true  priests,  these 
possess  the  faculty,  the  true  insight,  to  which  men  involuntarily 
pay  homage ;  the  more  they  have  been  recognised,  the  less  has 
the  outward  ordination  and  the  nominal  priesthood  been  regarded ; 
ultimately  they  alone  will  be  honoured ;  the  counterfeit  thing  will 
be  cast  out  as  withered  and  worthless.' 

There  are  indications  in  this  language  of  a  desire,  which  I,  at 
least,  cannot  regard  without  the  greatest  sympathy — a  desire  to 
discover  that  which  is  real,  and  to  separate  it  from  whatever  is 
artificial,  temporary,  and  insincere.  I  shall  not  inquire  whether 
this  desire  dwell  deeply  in  the  hearts  of  all  who  adopt  the  phrases 
which  express  it;  whether  these  phrases  may  not  be  as  easily 
learnt  by  rote,  and  as  glibly  repeated  as  any  others ;  whether  they 
may  not  offer  to  some  the  promise  of  an  easy  and  comfortable  sub- 
stitute for  any  zealous  efforts  to  disengage  their  own  minds  from 
the  frivolity  and  falsehood  which  they  so  eloquently  denounce. 
Such  questions  each  person  may  fitly  propose  to  himself :  I  would 
much  rather  deal  with  these  words  as  they  came  forth  from  the 
person  who  utters  them  with  the  least  self-deception,  with  the  most 
inward  longing  to  be  honest  himself  and  to  make  his  neighbours 
honest.  To  such  a  person,  I  would  at  once  concede  that  his  main 
proposition  is  right.  The  man  of  letters  and  the  man  of  science,  I 
believe,  are  called  of  God  to  the  work  in  which  they  are  engaged; 
they  are  his  ministers — I  would  earnestly  wish  that  they  might  feel 
themselves  to  be  so.    I  will  go  further;  I  will  admit  that  their 


384  SIGNS  OF  A 

function,  especially  that  of  any  one  who  has  a  real  poetical  gift, 
does  answer  in  several  most  important  respects  to  that  of  the  an- 
cient prophet ;  that  they  may,  without  any  impropriety,  be  said  to 
perform  a  similar  office,  and  to  be  endowed  with  powers  which 
correspond  to  the  circumstances  of  their  different  periods.  In  what 
sense  they  do  not  correspond,  in  what  respect  the  words  of  the 
Jewish  prophet  have  become  a  Scripture  and  are  taken  out  of  the 
circle  of  ordinary  words,  I  hope  to  consider  in  the  next  section.  Now  I 
am  speaking  of  them  as  living,  acting,  speaking  men,  and,  looking  at 
them  in  this  light,  I  think  it  far  more  important  to  mark  the  grounds  of 
their  essential  resemblance,  than  the  occasions  of  their  difference.  So 
far  from  wishing  the  modern  poet  or  philosopher  not  to  consider  him- 
self as  possessing  a  high  vocation  and  a  real  inspiration,  it  is  the  feel- 
ing which  I  should  most  wish  to  awaken  and  cultivate  in  him. 
What  I  dread  is  that  he  should  not  feel  this,  that  he  should  think  his 
words  are  his  own ;  that  he  should  glorify  himself  on  his  powers, 
and  so  inevitably  deprave  them  and  abuse  them.  The  misery  of 
the  last  age,  of  its  poets  especially,  was  that  they  utterly  cast  away 
this  belief.  When  they  talked  about  a  Muse  speaking  to  them  and 
teaching  them,  they  did  not  mean  what  they  said  ;  it  was  a  phrase 
merely  which  they  adopted  because  Homer  had  used  it  and  Virgil 
had  copied  it.  There  was  not  even  the  least  sense  of  the  words 
having  been  once  spoken  honestly ;  the  poor  old  singer  to  the 
maidens  of  the  Greek  isles  had,  forsooth,  invented  a  very  clever 
and  cunning  '  machinery.'  And  those  who  could  write  edifying 
critiques  on  "  Paradise  Lost,"  could  suppose  that  Milton  had 
solemnly  invoked  that  Spirit,  who  prefers  before  all  temples  the 
upright  heart  and  pure,  with  the  same  profaneness  to  assist  him  in 
a  task  of  the  same  kind.  What  could  an  age  which  cherished  such 
thoughts  have  produced,  but  ingenious  satires  upon  the  follies  of  the 
day,  and  elaborate  efforts  to  clothe  the  ancients  in  its  laces  and 
ruffles? 

By  all  means,  then,  let  those  who  feel  their  gifts  strong  in 
them,  train  themselves  to  an  awful  and  humble  acknowledgment 
of  them,  and  of  the  source  from  which  they  proceed.  It  is  not  the 
inclination  which  the  students  and  artists  of  our  land  show  to  put 
forth  these  claims  on  their  own  behalf,  which  should  make  any  re- 
ligious man  tremble.    Just  so  far  as  they  do  this,  they  have  taken 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  385 

a  great  step  out  of  the  infidelity  of  the  last  generation.  What  is 
alarming  is  the  pretension  which  accompanies  these  claims ;  the 
loud  talk  about  powers  and  faculties  not  derived  but  inherent;  the 
practical  evidence  which  our  men  of  talent  furnish  by  their  scorn 
and  contempt  of  others  that  they  do  rest  upon  these  inherent 
powers,  and  do  not  recognise  any  sustaining,  quickening  inspiration. 
Now  I  cannot  think  that  men  who  indulge  in  this  language  are 
likely  to  be  prophets  themselves,  or  to  recognise  the  prophetic  gift 
in  their  brethren.  It.  seems  to  me,  therefore,  most  needful  for  the 
sake  of  our  men  of  letters  and  of  the  world,  that  both  they  and  it 
should  be  reminded,  by  some  clear  and  visible  tokens,  what  they 
are,  whence  their  power  comes,  under  what  conditions  it  must  be 
exercised,  who  renders  it  effectual  for  the  good  of  men.  But  no 
one  desires  that  they,  in  their  own  persons,  should  receive  a  visi- 
ble designation.  Such  a  designation  would  be  incompatible 
with  the  character  of  their  office,  and  it  would  convey  little  in- 
struction to  other  men  respecting  their  own  position,  seeing  that 
they  regard  the  poet  or  man  of  letters  as  a  person  of  a  peculiar 
order,  following  an  impulse  different  from  that  which  they  obey, 
and  pursuing  a  different  class  of  objects.  But  supposing  there  ex- 
isted any  set  of  men  who  were  occupied  about  the  most  obvious 
and  interesting  circumstances  of  humanity,  those  which  are  com- 
mon to  the  tradesman  and  mechanic  with  the  man  of  genius,  those 
which  are  most  strange  but  yet  are  continually  recurring,  about 
marriage  and  sickness,  life  and  death ;  and  supposing  that  while 
thus  dealing  with  that  which  belongs  to  all  men,  they  were  yet 
dealing  with  it  as  related  to  those  awful  and  inward  feelings  which 
carry  us  out  of  the  visible  into  the  unseen  world ;  supposing  they 
even  connected  these  earthly  accidents  with  certain  fixed  and 
eternal  laws  of  that  region,  this  class  would  seem  to  be  one,  which 
from  the  general,  continuous,  and  practical  nature  of  their  duties, 
might  well  be  selected  as  signs  and  instances  to  all  men  of  the 
meaning  and  derivation  of  all  power ;  to  the  sage,  of  the  mean- 
ing and  derivation  of  those  powers  with  which  he  is  especial- 
ly intrusted.  Such  a  class  would  be  the  natural  link  between 
those  who  are  continually  liable  to  lose  their  sense  of  a  divine 
government  in  the  monotony  of  daily  occurrences,  and  those  who 
are  liable  to  lose  it  in  the  consciousness  of  their  own  energies. 


■ml 


386  SIGNS  OF  A 

And  if  it  should  come  to  pass  that  the  selected  class  should  itself 
lose  sight  of  its  position  by  falling  into  either  of  these  temptations, 
if  it  should  merely  court  an  outward  distinction,  and  occupy  itself 
in  a  round  of  outward  services,  forgetting  its  mysterious  meaning ; 
or  if,  in  the  desire  to  assert  its  difference  from  other  vocations,  it 
should  become  proud  and  self-exalting ;  then  I  know  not  what 
better  or  more  terrible  witness  can  be  borne  against  these  sins, 
what  more  terrible  prophecy  of  the  effects  which  must  flow  from 
them,  than  that  ordination,  which  has  marked  it  out  for  the  highest 
and  lowest  ministries;  which  has  declared,  that  we  exist  for  the 
sake  of  men,  that  all  our  authority  is  from  God,  that  our  only  safety 
is  in  forgetting  ourselves,  our  highest  privilege  to  be  instruments 
in  connecting  the  members  of  our  race  with  each  other  and  with 
their  Lord.  Abolish  our  ordination,  and  you  lose  the  strongest 
testimony  which  you  have  against  our  sins.  You  lose,  too,  I  am 
well  persauded,  one  of  the  greatest  securities  against  the  degrada- 
tion of  our  poets  and  men  of  learning,  through  sensual  contamina- 
tion or  through  spiritual  pride. 

The  Romish  System. 

It  remains  that  I  should  explain  wherein  the  views  I  have  ex- 
pressed on  the  subject  of  the  Christian  ministry  differ  from  those  of 
the  Romanists.  It  will  be  obvious  at  once,  that  on  some  most  im- 
portant points,  I  must  be  in  agreement  with  them.  For  I  have 
spoken  of  ministers  as  representing  Christ  to  men ;  I  have  main- 
tained that  the  absolving  power  is  not  a  nominal  but  a  real  one ; 
I  have  maintained  that  the  apostolic  functions  and  authority  still 
exist  in  the  Church  ;  I  have  admitted  the  Judaical  institutions  have 
their  counterparts  in  the  new  dispensation.  Let  us  inquire  under 
each  of  these  four  heads,  what  points  of  similarity  there  are  be- 
tween that  which  I  have  asserted  to  be  the  Catholic  principle,  and 
that  which  is  acknowledged  to  be  the  Romish  one. 

First,  I  have  spoken  of  ministers  as  representing  Christ  to  men. 
Long  before  there  was  the  assertion  of  a  supreme  vicar  of  Christ 
upon  earth,  there  was  a  feeling  in  men's  minds,  that  the  office  of 
the  priest  is  vicarial,  that  ministers  are  deputed  by  our  Lord  to  do 
that  work  now  which  He  did  himself  while  He  was  upon  earth. 
This  notion  has  gone  into  the  heart  of  the  Romish  system.  I 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


387 


believe  it  has  created  the  system.  Now  those  who  laugh  at  the 
notion  of  a  man  like  Athanasius  contending  to  the  death  about  an 
iota,  will,  of  course,  be  much  amused  by  my  affecting  to  discover 
an  important  difference  of  signification  in  the  words  representative 
and  vicarial.  And,  certainly,  if  the  difference  between  the  Nicene 
Fathers  and  the  Arians  was  a  difference  about  a  word  and  not 
about  a  reality,  those  who  contended  upon  either  side  were  very 
wTeak  and  vain  men.  And  if  I  suppose  any  charm  to  reside  in  these 
two  words,  so  that  the  one  which  I  reject  might  not  be  used  in 
a  good  sense,  and  the  one  which  I  adopt  in  an  evil  one,  I  shall  be 
exhibiting  a  less  pardonable  instance  of  folly.  But  I  will  endea- 
vour to  show  that  the  difference  to  which  I  allude,  whether  it  be 
rightly  or  improperly  expressed  by  these  particular  phrases,  is  as 
essential  and  practical  a  one  as  it  is  possible  to  conceive  of.  In 
the  word  vicarial,  the  Romanist  means  to  embody  his  notion  that 
the  priest  is  doing  the  work  of  one  who  is  absent,  and  who,  only  at 
certain  times  and  under  certain  conditions,  presents  himself  to  men. 
By  the  word  representative,  I  mean  to  express  the  truth  that  the 
minister  sets  forth  Christ  to  men  as  present  in  his  Church  at  all 
times,  as  exercising  those  functions  himself  upon  which  He  entered 
when  He  ascended  on  high.  Now  it  must  be  felt,  I  think,  that 
this  is  a  radical  difference,  not  about  a  word,  but  about  the  most 
solemn  question  upon  which  the  mind  of  man  can  be  occupied. 
And  it  will  be  seen  that  it  is  no  isolated  difference.  It  stands  in 
the  closest  connexion  with  all  those  which  we  have  been  taking 
notice  of  in  former  sections.  The  principle  of  the  Catholic  Church 
which  I  have  endeavoured  to  develope  in  reference  to  Baptism,  the 
Eucharist,  the  Creed,  the  Forms  of  Worship,  is  the  principle  of  a 
direct,  real,  and  practical  union  between  men  and  their  Lord.  The 
doctrine  of  the  Romish  system,  which  we  have  discovered  in 
each  and  all  of  these  cases,  is  that  the  veil  between  us  and  the  in- 
visible world  is  not  yet  withdrawn  ;  that  offices  and  ordinances  are 
not  the  organs  through  which  men  converse  with  their  Lord  and 
He  with  them,  but  are  mere  outward  things,  which  He  has  stamp- 
ed with  a  certain  authority  and  virtue,  or  mere  pictures  which  ex- 
hibit Him  to  the  imagination.  Happily,  this  system  has  never 
fully  realized  itself;  there  seems  an  impossibility  in  the  nature  of 
things  that  it  should.    The  moment  it  becomes  or  nearly  becomes 


388 


SIGNS  OF  A 


that  which  it  is  always  striving  to  be,  it  so  entirely  loses  its  mean- 
ing, it  becomes  such  a  merely  oppressive  phantom,  that  the  judg- 
ments of  God,  and  the  faith  as  well  as  the  infidelity  of  man,  appear 
together  to  confound  it. 

2.  It  follows  from  what  I  have  said,  that  the  absolving  power 
which  I  claim  for  the  Catholic  priest  is  altogether  a  different  one 
from  that  which  is  claimed  by  the  Romish  priest.  I  do  not  say 
that  it  is  a  less  power,  it  seems  to  me  a  much  greater  one.  He 
who  can,  in  Christ's  name,  declare  to  a  man  that  the  state  of  union 
with  Christ,  which  was  assured  to  him  in  baptism,  is  his  state  still ; 
that  he  has  committed  evil  by  living  inconsistently  with  it ;  that 
this  evil  shall  not  be  imputed  to  him,  though  it  may  perchance  be 
sorely  punished  for  his  good,  if  he  turn  to  God  and  claim  the  better 
life  which  is  his,  in  his  Lord;  that  he  shall  have  strength  from  Him 
to  be  his  servant  and  do  his  will ;  that  he  shall  know  Him,  and 
that  this  knowledge  shall  make  him  free ;  he  who  can  pronounce 
these  words  confidently,  because  they  are  true  and  because  he  has 
received  a  commission  to  declare  them  to  such  and  such  men 
— neither  their  truth  nor  his  commission  being  in  the  slightest 
degree  affected  by  the  unbelief  and  the  consequent  unrepent- 
ance  of  those  to  whom  they  are  addressed — has  a  power  of 
absolution  affecting  the  past,  the  present,  and  the  future,  which  he 
would  be  sorry  indeed  to  exchange  for  any  which  have  ever  been 
exercised,  by  those  who  claimed  it  vicarially  as  their  own,  not  re- 
presentatively as  their  Lord's.  For  he  must  perceive,  if  he  know 
any  thing  of  history,  that  this  vicarial  power  has  been  one  which 
did  not  absolve  the  human  spirit,  but  bound  it  with  heavy  chains, 
giving  it  no  sense  of  the  glorious  liberty  which  Christ  has  pur- 
chased for  it ;  not  only  leaving  it  but  teaching  it  to  grovel  when 
God  has  provided  wings  wherewith  it  may  soar.  How  could  pe- 
nances ever  have  been  translated  from  their  proper  and  legitimate 
use,  as  means  whereby  those  evil  habits  may  be  subdued  which 
make  the  spirit  proud,  and  hinder  it  from  being  free,  into  heavy 
shackles  and  torments  of  the  conscience,  into  checks  upon  all  holy 
and  thankful  devotion,  into  instruments  of  pride  and  self-exaltation, 
if  those  who  enjoined  them  had  really  felt  that  they  were  acting  on 
behalf  of  the  great  Redeemer  and  Absolver ;  if  they  had  not 
said  within  their  hearts,  "  The  Lord  delayeth  his  coming,"  and 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


389 


therefore  had  thought  themselves  privileged  to  heat  the  men-ser- 
vants and  the  rnaid-servants,  while  they  themselves  ate  and  drank, 
and  were  drunken  ?  How  could  the  monstrous  thought  of  indul- 
gences ever  have  crept  into  the  minds  of  men  who  had  not  lost  the 
sense  of  their  direct  subjection  to  an  invisible  Lord,  and  therefore 
of  necessity  had  become  the  slaves  of  those  whom  they  professed 
to  rule,  obliged  to  cater  to  their  fleshly  and  worldly  appetites,  in 
order  that  they  might  keep  them  in  bondage  ?  These  may  be 
very  old  stories,  but  they  are  written  legibly  upon  the  history  of 
the  world,  not  to  be  exaggerated,  doubtless,  for  the  sake  of  establish- 
ing Protestant  conclusions,  but  also  not  to  be  erased  by  any  chica- 
nery of  another  kind  ;  not  to  be  overlooked,  because  we  may 
choose  to  fancy  that  other  facts  of  an  opposite  kind  concern  us 
more  nearly.  Facts  cannot  contradict  each  other.  The  records  of 
the  miseries  which  the  Romish  system  has  produced,  cannot  con- 
tradict those  which  prove  even  to  the  satisfaction  of  the  most 
thoughtful  liberals  of  our  day,  that  the  Catholic  Church  has  con- 
ferred innumerable  blessings  upon  mankind.  If  we  only  understand 
both  they  must  confirm  and  illustrate  each  other.  What  we  want 
to  discover  is  the  point  of  their  connexion. 

3.  This  point,  I  believe,  is  found  in  that  Romanist  application  of 
the  vicarial  doctrine  which  has  reference  to  the  episcopal  or  apos- 
tolic authority.  According  to  the  representative  doctrine,  all  minis- 
ters exhibit  Christ  in  that  office  to  which  they  are  called.  The 
whole  body  of  bishops — each  bishop  in  his  own  sphere— present 
him  to  men  as  the  bishop  or  overseer  of  the  Church.  Once  make 
ministers  vicarial,  and  it  is  evident  that  we  have  the  seed  of  an  en- 
tirely new  scheme.  The  oneness  and  universality  of  Christ's  office 
of  course  distinguishes  Him  from  each  one  of  his  representatives, 
and  from  the  whole  body  of  his  representatives.  But  this  oneness 
and  this  universality  are  utterly  lost  to  the  world,  they  are  merely 
dreams — if  Christ  be  absent  from  his  Church.  They  must,  therefore, 
be  imaged  somewhere,  since  they  have  lost  their  virtue  as  realities. 
Ministers  must  not  only  be  vicars  of  Christ,  but  there  must  be  a 
vicar  of  Christ ;  one  who  absorbs  into  himself,  and  exhibits  in  him- 
self his  one  and  universal  episcopacy.  Here  is  the  Popedom,  an 
idea  which  may  have  been  most  gradual  in  its  development,  which 
could  not  come  forth  into  actual  manifestation  as  a  Church  idea, 


390 


SIGNS  OF  A 


while  one  so  very  like  it  was  openly  realized  as  the  idea  of  the 
World  in  the  persons  of  the  Roman  emperors  :  but  which,  neverthe- 
less, was  latent  in  the  minds  of  all  ministers,  who  assumed  to  them- 
selves a  vicarial  character — in  the  minds  of  all  laymen  who  acknow- 
ledged them  in  that  character.  The  conception  of  an  apostolical 
primacy  in  St.  Peter,  upon  which  it  appears  to  rest,  is  evidently  a 
mere  creature  of  this  idea,  a  harmless,  it  may  be  a  legitimate,  his- 
torical theory  when  considered  in  itself ;  but  when  it  has  received 
the  vicarial  virus,  capable  of  supporting  one  of  the  greatest  denials 
and  contradictions  recorded  in  the  annals  of  the  universe.  For  this 
view  of  the  Popedom  is  not  merely  that  which  came  under  our  no- 
tice, when  we  were  considering  how  men  had  been  led  to  look  for 
a  great  dogmatist  to  give  them  right  and  safe  opinions ;  this  is  that 
other  aspect  of  the  office,  its  kingly  aspect,  that  in  which  it  presents 
itself  either  as  the  true  law  of  Christ's  kingdom,  or  as  the  flagrant 
transgression  and  violation  of  it.  If  Christ  be  really  in  his  Church, 
if  all  the  offices  of  the  Church  be  declaring  Him  to  men,  then  is  the 
existence  of  a  Pope  the  most  frightful  of  all  anomalies,  then  is  his 
existence  a  key  to  all  the  other  anomalies  in  the  history  of  Chris- 
tianity. If  Christ  be  not  really  in  his  Church,  if  there  be  no  real 
connexion  between  Him  and  those  who  speak  in  his  name,  or  if 
that  connexion  be  merely  an  individual  one,  and  there  be  no  spirit- 
ual constitution  among  men,  then  I  own  I  do  not  see  how  the 
popish  system  can  fail  to  commend  itself  to  us  as  the  most  compre- 
hensive, the  most  effective,  the  most  practical  religious  organization 
ever  conceived  of.  Nor  will  this  conviction  be  materially  weaken- 
ed by  any  display  of  the  evils  which  the  system  may  have  produced. 
All  these  will  be  described  as  excesses.  We  shall  be  asked,  what 
is  so  good  or  so  divine,  that  it  is  not  exposed  to  corruption  from  the 
corruption  of  the  human  will  ?  We  shall  be  asked,  how  we  can 
account  for  the  good  that  flowed  in  the  middle  ages,  not  from  a  cer- 
tain idea  of  Christianity  merely,  but  from  that  idea  as  expressed  in 
the  organization  of  the  Church  ?  I  think  we  are  able  to  answer, 
as  we  have  answered  before,  '  This  papal  system' is  itself,  in  its 
simplest,  best  form,  that  result  of  the  corrupt  human  will  which  you 
speak  of.  It  is  itself  not  the  excess  but  the  counterfeit  of  the  Church 
constitution,  the  violation  indeed  of  an  idea,  but  also  of  the  organi- 
zation in  which  that  idea  is  embodied.  Because  it  could  not  destroy 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


391 


that  idea  or  that  organization,  the  Church  Catholic  was  able  to  dif- 
fuse some  of  those  blessings  which  God  meant  it  to  diffuse.  Just  so 
far  as  the  system  prevailed,  just  so  far  as  it  did  not  contradict  itself 
by  asserting  the  principles  it  sets  at  nought,  it  has  hindered  God's 
mercies  from  reaching  the  world,  it  has  turned  them  into  curses.' 
Such  language  as  this  craves  to  be  tried  by  Scripture,  by  history, 
by  the  conscience  of  papists  themselves,  by  the  truths  which  they 
profess,  and  which  some  of  them,  I  am  convinced,  hold  most  dear. 
The  other  language  which  supposes  that  there  is  no  spiritual  consti- 
tution of  Christ's  ministry,  has,  I  believe,  done  more,  and  is,  at  this 
present  time,  doing  more  to  promote  and  establish  Popery  than  all 
its  own  most  diligent  efforts. 

4.  I  must  still  allude  briefly  to  the  connexion  which  I  suppose, 
and  which  the  Romanist  supposes,  to  exist  between  the  Jewish  and 
the  Christian  economy.  We  are  agreed  so  far  as  this — we  both 
believe  the  connexion  to  be  a  real  one,  we  both  believe  that  it  has 
to  do  with  an  ecclesiastical  economy,  we  both  believe  that  the  forms 
of  the  Jewish  commonwealth,  so  far  as  they  were  not  merely  nation- 
al or  oriental,  were  translated  into  corresponding  forms,  and  not 
merely  into  spiritual  notions.  Wherein  then  do  we  differ  ?  In  this 
all-important  point,  that  we  look  upon  the  Incarnation,  the  Resur- 
rection, and  the  Ascension  of  our  Lord,  as  declaring  Him  to  be  real- 
ly and  actually,  not  nominally  or  fantastically,  head  of  the  universal 
kingdom  as  the  mortal  High  Priest  had  been  of  the  peculiar  king- 
dom, all  the  Jewish  history  being  a  preparation  for  the  substitution 
of  the  one  for  the  other.  They  believe  that  this  High  Priest  has 
been  succeeded  in  the  new  dispensation  by  one  mortal  and  sinful  as 
himself ;  that  he  is  to  preserve  the  doctrines  of  the  Creed  to  the 
Church,  while  he  practically  and  in  his  own  person  declares  that 
those  doctrines  do  not  mean  what  they  seem  to  mean  ;  that  a  real 
connexion  has  not  been  established  between  man  and  God  in  the 
person  of  the  Mediator;  that  the  Church  is  not  what  her  Creed  af- 
firms her  to  be,  united  to  Him  in  his  victory  as  well  as  in  his  hu- 
miliation. Again,  then,  we  contend,  and  with  so  much  more  con- 
viction and  earnestness,  as  we  approach  nearer  to  the  heart  of  the  sub- 
ject, that  the  Romish  system  and  the  Catholic  Church,  instead  of  being 
identical,  instead  of  having  any  natural  affinity  for  each  other,  are 
deadly  opposites,  one  of  which  must  perish  if  the  other  is  to  survive. 


392 


SIGNS  OF  A 


SECTION  VI. 
THE  SCRIPTURES. 

In  a  preceding  chapter  I  inquired  into  the  meaning  of  certain 
indications  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  constitution  which  offered 
themselves  to  us  while  we  were  studying  the  actual  phenomena  of 
the  world  and  its  past  history.  We  wanted  some  help  to  explain 
these  to  us,  and  to  tell  us  how  they  should  exist  and  yet  the  acknow- 
ledgment of  this  constitution  by  men  should  seem  to  be  the  excep- 
tion rather  than  the  rule.  We  found  this  help  in  the  documents 
which  compose  our  Bible.  These  documents  profess  to  reveal  a 
constitution,  which  is  declared  to  be  the  divine  constitution  for  man. 
It  is  revealed  first  to  a  particular  family,  then  to  a  particular  nation, 
then,  through  that  family  and  nation,  to  mankind.  But  this  reve- 
lation is  a  history.  The  acts  of  this  family  and  this  nation,  and 
the  acts  by  which  their  possession  becomes  an  universal  one,  embo- 
dy the  discovery.  The  oppositions  which  arise  without  and  within 
this  family  and  nation  to  the  principle  upon  which  they  are  founded, 
explain  to  us  the  contradiction  between  the  will  of  man  and  the 
order  in  which  he  is  placed.  They  make  us  conscious  of  the  exist- 
ence of  two  societies,  one  formed  in  accordance  with  the  order  of 
God,  the  other  based  upon  self-will. 

Now,  as  the  Bible  declares  that  the  constitution  which  it  affirms 
to  be  the  true  one  should  last  for  ever,  and  as  it  speaks  of  a  society 
grounded  upon  that  constitution  which  is  to  last  for  ever,  we  wish- 
ed to  inquire  what  signs  there  are  of  such  a  society  in  the  world  at 
this  present  moment.  We  have  discovered  some,  which  seem  to 
import  the  existence  of  it ;  we  have  inquired  whether  they  cor- 
respond with  the  signs  of  it  which  we  found  set  down  in  Scripture. 
Thus  we  have  referred  to  the  Bible,  not  only  to  clear  up  our 
difficulties  respecting  the  meaning  of  God  in  his  universe,  but 
also  to  tell  us  how  far  that  meaning  is  effectual  for  us  at  this 
day,  not  only  to  make  known  the  nature  of  the  order  in  which  we 
are  placed,  but  also  the  outward  shape  of  the  body  in  which  that 
order  is  expressed. 

It  may  seem,  then,  that  the  purpose  and  character  of  the  Scrip- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


393 


tures  have  been  already  investigated  as  much  at  large  as  the  limits 
of  a  book  like  this  can  permit,  especially  as  the  subject  has  already 
come  before  us  in  another  shape,  while  we  were  discussing  the 
opinions  of  different  religious  bodies.  But  it  can  hardly  escape 
the  observation  of  any  reader,  that  if  there  be  such  a  book  as  the 
Bible  has  seemed  to  us  to  be,  it  must  not  only  interpret  to  us  the 
signs  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  kingdom,  but  must  be  itself  one 
of  the  most  remarkable  of  those  signs.  And  if  so,  we  may,  per- 
haps, by  considering  its  relation  to  the  other  signs  of  which  we 
have  spoken,  obtain  a  solution  of  some  difficulties  which  much  em- 
barrass the  modern  student. 

I.  1st.  This  view  of  the  general  intent  of  the  Scriptures  seems 
to  show  how  particular  books  may  have  been  ascertained  to  form 
a  part  of  them,  or  to  have  no  claims  of  admission  to  them.  To 
conceive  the  possibility  of  a  canon  of  Scripture  is  the  same  thing 
as  to  conceive  the  possibility  of  Scripture  itself.  If  one  be  neces- 
sary, the  other  is  necessary.  If  one  be  supposed  to  be  formed  by 
human  agency,  there  is  no  difficulty  in  supposing  that  human 
agency  should  have  been  most  proper  for  the  other.  Regard  the 
Bible  merely  as  an  isolated  thing,  and  it  is  no  doubt  hard  to  under- 
stand how  such  an  authority  as  that  of  fixing  what  it  is,  should 
have  been  exercised  by  any  persons  who  were  not  employed  in 
the  writing  of  it.  Look  upon  it  as  the  witness  of  a  permanent 
kingdom,  believe  that  it  is  a  part  of  the  plan  of  God  for  the  estab- 
lishment and  building  up  of  that  kingdom,  and  there  is  surely  no 
difficulty  in  supposing  that  wisdom  adequate  to  the  work  of  deter- 
mining, with  all  necessary  practical  exactness,  what  books  did  and 
what  did  not  contain  the  authentic  history  of  this  kingdom,  should 
have  been  imparted  to  men,  whose  offices  proclaimed  that  they 
could  not  fulfil  their  most  ordinary  tasks  by  any  wisdom  of  their 
own. 

2dly.  By  looking  at  the  Scriptures  as  the  sign  of  a  spiritual 
and  universal  kingdom,  we  seem  able  to  reconcile  several  methods 
or  schemes  for  interpreting  them,  which  often  present  themselves 
to  us  as  contradictory  and  exclusive.  For  instance,  it  has  been 
one  well  known  tendency  of  men  to  look  for  a  mystical  character 
in  them,  to  suppose  that  beneath  the  letter  some  secret  cabala 
must  be  lurking.    It  has  been  the  tendency  of  another  class  to 


394 


SIGNS  OF  A 


maintain  the  strictness  and  sufficiency  of  the  letter,  and  indignantly 
to  repudiate  every  recondite  meaning  as  inconsistent  with  the  sim- 
plicity of  a  revelation.  Now  every  sign  of  this  kingdom  which 
we  have  considered  hitherto  has  partaken  of  this  double  character; 
it  has  pointed  to  a  relation  which  is  invisible,  mystical,  transcend- 
ent ;  it  has  been  in  itself  plain,  definite,  visible.  The  relation 
which  it  expressed  was  real  and  permanent ;  here  lay  the  necessity 
of  a  sign  which  had  nothing  in  it  of  a  fluctuating  character,  which 
did  not  derive  its  strength  from  the  notions  and  apprehensions  of 
men,  which  spoke  to  all.  One  would  certainly  expect  to  find  the 
same  principle  holding  good  in  the  case  of  this  other  sign  ;  one 
would  think  that  the  more  simple,  accurate,  and  historical  the  out- 
ward clothing  was,  the  more  it  would  be  felt  to  embody  some  higher 
principle. 

Again;  it  has  been  a  great  controversy  whether  each  part  of 
these  records  should  be  taken  to  have  a  disiinct  definite  meaning, 
applicable  to  some  particular  event  and  crisis,  or  whether  it  may 
have  a  remote  application  to  some  other  crisis,  or  even  to  a  series 
of  yet  undeveloped  events.  Now  supposing  the  Bible  to  be  the 
history  of  the  gradual  development  and  manifestation  of  a  kingdom 
fixed  upon  certain  permanent  principles,  it  seems  the  most  natural 
supposition,  that  it  would  always  exhibit  these  principles  in  refer- 
ence to  some  present  or  approaching  contingency,  yet  that  it  would  • 
explain  similar  contingencies  and  circumstances  to  the  end  of  time. 
Refusing  to  acknowledge  the  first  event,  we  lose  the  principle ; 
determined  to  restrict  it  to  some  other  event  of  our  own  selection, 
we  compel  ourselves  to  depart  from  the  letter  without  gaining 
any  thing  for  the  spirit.  We  may  be  right  in  our  feeling  that  the 
particular  event  we  have  fixed  upon  does  fall  under  the  law  which 
this  part  of  Scripture  makes  known  to  us  ;  we  are  almost  sure  to 
be  wrong  when  we  restrain  the  application  of  the  law  to  that 
given  event.  These  conclusions  proceed  naturally  from  the  belief 
that  the  Scriptures  are  not  to  be  looked  upon  apart  from  the  spirit- 
ual kingdom. 

3dly.  Hence  also  we  seem  to  obtain  the  solution  of  another, 
and  what  strikes  many  as  a  more  difficult  problem,  Where  are  the 
interpreters  of  this  book  to  be  found  ?  how  is  it  at  once  to  be  a 
lawgiver,  and  yet  to  be  subject  to  the  maxims  and  rules  of  inter- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  395 

V 

pretation  of  those  who  are  its  subjects  ?  The  difficulty  is  the  same 
as  in  all  previous  cases.  Take  the  Bible  as  a  solitary  fact,  speak 
of  it  simply  as  the  Word  of  God  addressing  itself  to  man,  -without 
inquiring  what  this  word  of  God  affirms  man  to  be,  what  kind  of 
order  it  says  that  he  is  placed  in  ;  and  there  must  be  endless  puz- 
zles to  ascertain  in  what  position  of  simple  acquiescence  or  earn- 
est inquiry  such  utterances  are  to  be  received,  whether  each  man 
is  to  grasp  them  for  himself,  or  whether  his  fellows  are  in  any  wise 
helping  him  to  grasp  them. 

But  let  it  be  supposed  that  the  words  speak  'as  they  seem  to 
speak,  of  men  being  placed  in  a  certain  divine  order — of  God,  as 
addressing  them  in  that  order — it  would  seem  plain  enough  that 
the  words  will  be  realized  just  so  far  as  we  avail  ourselves  of  our 
position,  missed  just  so  far  as  we  reject  it.  The  difficulty  of  under- 
standing how,  through  the.  help  of  Christ's  ministers,  wTe  may  at- 
tain to  a  practical  insight  into  the  facts  and  principles  which  this 
book  makes  known,  how,  choosing  to  dispense  with  that  help,  we 
shall  be  most  likely  to  go  astray,  is  precisely  the  difficulty  which  is 
supposed  in  all  education  ;  or,  would  it  not  be  more  correct  to  say, 
that  here  wTe  find  the  key  to  the  puzzles  of  ordinary  education,  be- 
cause we  arrive  at  a  point,  where  we  find  God  proclaiming  Him- 
self as  the  educator,  and  marking  out  those  through  whom  He  will 
educate  ?  The  difficulty  which  arises  from  the  discovery  that 
these  ministers  may  forget  their  task,  and  instead  of  calling  out  the 
personal  life  and  apprehension  of  their  disciples,  stifle  them  with 
mere  words  and  notions,  is  still  the  same  problem  of  daily  life  re- 
peated, only  that  we  perceive  more  clearly  against  whom  the  sin  is 
committed,  and  what  the  responsibility  for  it  is.  The  difficulty  of 
comprehending  how  men  should  teach  out  of  a  book,  which  they 
acknowledge  to  overreach  themselves,  and  to  be  above  them,  is 
but  the  difficulty  of  every  magistrate  and  judge  who  is  set  for  the 
purpose  of  bringing  out  into  light  and  clearness  the  meaning  of  the 
Law  which  he  both  administers  and  obeys,  who  may,  doubtless, 
put  himself  in  the  place  of  it,  may  read  himself  into  it,  may  choose 
to  keep  it  from  men  instead  of  guiding  them  into  an  intelligent 
submission  to  it,  but  who  acts  in  this  way  at  his  peril,  bringing 
himself  under  the  sentence,  if  of  no  earthly  superior,  of  one  who 


396     '  SIGNS  OF  A 

yet,  in  this  spiritual  kingdom,  holds  his  constant  and  acknowledged 
court  of  appeal. 

II.  These  questions  are  debated  between  those  who  are  agreed 
in  acknowledging  the  Scriptures  as  possessing  divine  authority. 
Let  us  now7  consider  the  objections  of  those  w7ho  either  reject  the 
notion  of  a  Bible  altogether,  or  who  see  no  special  reason  why  the 
books  which  we  hold  sacred  should  usurp  the  name. 

These  objections  may  be  stated  in  this  way.  4  Ever  since  the 
critical  spirit  and  knowledge  of  modern  Europe  have  been  brought 
to  bear  upon  these  documents,  it  has  been  found  more  and  more 
difficult  to  maintain  the  claims  which  are  put  forth  on  their  behalf 
by  the  elder  church  as  well  as  by  the  reformers.  Supposing  the 
doctrine  of  their  inspiration,  of  their  paramount  authority  to  all 
other  books,  of  their  fixed  and  peculiar  character,  to  be  true,  the 
detection  of  any  unauthentic  record  amongst  them,  of  any  report 
which  will  not  bear  sifting,  even  of  any  considerable  error  in  the 
reading  of  a  text  which  had  been  used  to  support  some  opinion, 
must  be  sufficient  to  shake  the  credit  of  the  whole  scheme.  It  was, 
therefore,  unquestionably  honest  in  those  early  critics  who  wished 
to  assert  the  general  authority  of  the  book,  that  they  ventured  to 
commence  these  fatal  inroads.  But  if  they  were  not  stopped  at 
first,  they  certainly  cannot  be  stopped  nowr.  The  principle  of  criti- 
cism, which  has  been  admitted  as  to  a  part,  must  be  applied  to 
the  whole.  Whatever  maxim  has  been  thought  just,  and  has  stood 
the  test  of  inquiry  in  reference  to  other  books,  must  be  brought 
to  bear  upon  these.  And  little  help  will  be  derived  in  our  day 
from  those  evidences,  wThich  in  the  last  century  were  thought  so 
conclusive.  The  credit  of  the  book  wras  supposed  to  be  sustained 
by  the  miracles  which  are  recorded  in  it,  by  the  consistency  of  the 
facts  with  the  general  testimony  of  antiquity,  by  the  admirable 
character  of  the  four  narratives  which  form  the  centre  of  it,  by  its 
ideal  truth  and  consistency.  NowT  those  miracles  are  the  very 
stories  which  we  require  should  be  accounted  for.  The  testimony 
of  antiquity  has  been  proved  only  to  establish  the  existence  of 
certain  habits  of  thought  and  feeling  in  different  nations,  which 
will  themselves  account  for  what  has  been  supposed  to  be  peculiar 
in  these  records.    The  four  narratives  have  been  subjected  to  a 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


397 


severe  analysis,  and  it  has  been  found  most  difficult  to  understand 
either  their  internal  history  or  their  relation  to  outward  events. 
Finally,  the  supposed  ideal  consistency  has  been  examined  of  the 
whole  record,  and  has  been  shown,  indeed,  to  be  an  explanation  of 
the  phenomena  of  Christianity,  but  in  a  way  most  unsatisfactory 
to  those  who  regard  it  as  embodied  in  a  series  of  facts.' 

This  is  a  statement,  I  hope  it  is  a  fair  statement,  of  the  objections 
which  are  now  current  in  all  parts  of  society,  and  which,  when 
they  do  not  appear  as  a  complete  system  of  arguments,  are  only  the 
more  effectual,  because  they  suggest  the  thought  that  much  has 
been  left  unsaid  which  would  be  quite  conclusive  if  it  might  safely 
be  uttered. 

I  begin,  then,  with  admitting  that  I  do  not  see  how  it  is  possible 
for  those  who  look  upon  the  Scriptures  merely  as  a  set  of  documents 
contrived  for  the  instruction  of  individual  men,  merely  as  a  witness 
to  them  of  what  has  been  done  for  them,  of  what  the  plans  and 
purposes  of  God  respecting  them  are,  to  encounter  some  of  these 
arguments.  I  do  not  mean  that  they  may  not  encounter  them  prac- 
ticilly,  in  what  seems  to  me  a  most  honest  and  effectual  method.  If 
they  will  resolutely  hold  fast  that  which  they  have  felt  and  ascer- 
tained in  their  own  lives  to  be  true ;  if  they  will  say,  '  This  we 
have  learnt  and  received;  the  Bible  taught  it  us,  and  we  cannot 
give  it  up  for  any  arguments I  believe  their  position  is  a  safe  and 
impregnable  one.  It  is  not  a  position  of  prejudice,  it  is  a  reasonable 
and  sound  position ;  it  is  founded  upon  the  first  and  wisest  maxim 
of  ethiral  philosophy,  Keep  what  thou  hast ;  add  to  it  if  thou  canst ; 
but  if  thou  wishest  to  realize  more,  never  let  any  thing  which  thou 
hast  realized  be  snatched  away  from  thee.  My  fear  is  that  few 
people  in  our  day  are  likely  to  be  content  with  this  position.  They 
will  be  going  out  of  it  with  their  arguments  and  their  evidences, 
with  their  attempts  to  prove  how  and  why  a  book  having  the  char- 
acter which  they  impute  to  the  Bible,  must  be  divine  and  perfect. 
Here  I  think  they  will  be  discomfited.  This  logic  is  not  a  part  of 
their  realized  truths,  it  is  something  altogether  extraneous  to  them. 
And  what  is  worse,  they  do  not  yet  know  what  it  is  they  are  argu- 
ing about ;  for  they  may  have  derived  these  individual  facts  from 
the  Bible  ;  but  the  Bible  itself  evidently  assumes  to  be  something 
else ;  it  assumes  to  be  a  collection  of  historical  documents,  and  the 

26 


398 


SIGNS  OF  A 


question  is,  how  this  assumption  is  connected  with  that  quality  of 
it  which  they  have  discovered  and  recognised. 

Are  we,  then,  to  hope  that  those  who  are  willing  to  consider  it 
principally  as  a  collection  of  historical  documents,  and  as  such  to 
defend  it,  will  be  able  to  maintain  their  position  1  I  think  writers 
of  this  class  will  bring  forward  much  that  is  very  valuable,  much 
that  their  opponents  cannot  without  great  difficulty  and  without 
some  dishonesty,  reply  to ;  I  think  they  will  do  more  than  this  j 
they  will  be  enabled  to  leave  an  impression  upon  thoughtful  and 
sincere  minds,  that  there  are  facts  existing  in  the  world  now,  and 
that  there  has  been  a  series  of  such  facts,  of  which  these  books 
may  offer  the  explanation.  But  here,  again,  the  difficulty  is  to  find 
how  these  facts  cohere,  how  it  is  that  they  are  related  to  the  doc- 
trines and  principles  which  these  books  embody ;  why  it  is  neces- 
sary to  suppose  any  divine  oversight  in  the  arrangement  and  pre- 
servation of  them. 

Are  we  then  to  say,  as  the  objector  affirms  we  must  say,  that 
criticism  is  wholly  inapplicable  to  this  particular  set  of  records ; 
that  they  must  be  taken  for  granted  upon  some  authority  or  other, 
be  it  that  of  primitive  antiquity,  or  of  the  Church  in  the  present 
day ;  and  that,  being  so  taken  for  granted,  all  further  inquiry  re- 
specting them  is  to  be  discarded  ?  Every  one  will  see  that  there  is 
a  plausibility  in  this  opinion ;  nay,  there  is  more  than  plausibility, 
there  is  a  truth  hidden  in  it  which  we  must  not  deny.  As  long  as 
we  receive  the  Scriptures  at  all,  as  long  as  we  do  not  determine  abso- 
lutely to  reject  them,  we  must  in  the  education  of  our  own  minds, 
in  the  education  of  our  children's  minds,  take  them  for  granted. 
We  cannot  begin  with  being  critics,  or  with  making  them  critics. 
If  we  do,  we  and  they  will  assuredly  be  most  miserable  critics,  and 
as  certainly  we  and  they  shall  be  nothing  else.  But  do  we  not  in 
this  respect  deal  with  the  Scriptures  as  we  deal  with  other  books  ? 
We  take  them  for  granted  too  ;  we  do  not  in  merely  reading  or  in 
teaching  them,  enter  into  a  criticism  of  the  sources  whence  they 
are  derived  or  of  the  conditions  of  their  authority.  There  comes  a 
time,  however,  when  other  books  are  subjected  to  this  trial ;  it  has 
been  the  will  of  God  that  the  book  which  we  consider  pre-eminently 
his,  should  be  subjected  to  the  same.  It  is  a  solemn  inquiry  for  us, 
whether  we  shall  dare  to  pretend  that  we  will  take  better  care  of 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


399 


his  book  than  He  has  taken  of  it ;  whether  we  shall  affirm  that  it 
cannot  bear  the  application  of  tests,  which  we  believe  that  ordinary 
literature  will  bear. 

And  this  brings  us  to  the  main  question  which  I  wish  to  place 
before  the  reader,  What  has  been  the  character  of  that  criticism  to 
which  the  Scriptures  have  been  for  the  most  part  subjected  during 
the  last  century  and  a  half  1  I  do  not  ask  whether  it  has  been 
sound  criticism,  learned  criticism,  devout  criticism.  It  may  have 
had  any  or  all  of  these  characters.  But  what  has  been  its  object  ? 
The  safest  answer  with  respect  to  the  last  century  may  be  obtained 
from  a  consideration  of  what  was  the  object  of  all  criticism,  whether 
it  referred  to  the  human  body  or  the  human  soul,  to  the  universe  or 
to  the  creatures  who  lived  in  it.  Nearly  every  philosopher  of  that 
day  thought  it  was  the  business  of  his  life  to  analyze  ;  he  was  to 
analyze  the  operations  of  the  mind,  to  analyze  himself,  to  analyze 
his  fellow  creatures,  to  analyze  the  being  of  his  Maker.  Do  I  say 
that  all  this  labour  was  wasted,  that  nothing  came  out  of  the  in- 
quiries and  dissections  of  that  period?  I  say  no  such  thing;  I 
believe  much  was  learnt  from  them  ;  that  many  false  notions  and 
phantoms,  which  men  had  transferred  from  themselves  to  the  objects 
of  their  study,  were  got  rid  of;  many  idols  thrown  down,  broken 
in  pieces,  and  trampled  upon,  which  had  beset  the  caves  of  thought- 
ful men  or  the  market-places  of  busy  men.  But  the  great  lesson 
of  all  which  this  method  of  study  bequeathed  to  us,  was  the  lesson 
of  its  own  utter  incapacity  to  lead  into  the  apprehension  of  any 
truth,  though  it  might  avail  for  the  discomfiture  of  some  error. 
Hence  every  step  that  has  been  taken  in  our  day  towards  real  pro- 
fitable inquiry,  whether  in  physics  or  metaphysics,  has  been  a  step 
out  of  this  method,  a  step  towards  the  investigation  of  the  powers 
and  principles  of  things  as  they  exist ;  not  an  attempt,  except  for 
certain  subordinate  purposes,  to  reduce  them  into  their  elements. 
Above  all,  this  change  has  been  effected  in  reference  to  literature. 
Here  the  analytical  spirit  of  the  last  age,  displayed  itself  in  its  full 
power ;  every  book  was  to  be  cut  up  into  its  elements,  and  whatever 
elements  did  not  please  the  critic  to  be  cast  out  as  worthless ;  nothing 
whatever  was  done  in  the  study  of  a  book  as  a  whole,  nothing 
towards  the  discovery  of  the  purpose  which  actuated  and  informed 
it.    The  Scriptures  were  treated  in  the  same  manner.    The  fact  of 


400 


SIGNS  OF  A 


their  constituting  a  whole,  which  had  been  felt  as  a  whole  by  innu- 
merable minds  for  many  centuries,  was  more  and  more  overlooked  as 
utterly  unimportant  to  the  critic  and  the  philosopher.  He  could  not 
deny  that  they  had  a  common  name,  but  his  business  was  to  show 
what  separate  items  went  to  the  composition  of  this  name,  and  then 
to  pursue  his  inquiries  with  as  little  reference  as  possible  to  it.  Of 
course  it  was  part  of  the  ordinary  philosophy  at  the  period,  that  every 
thing  in  this  book,  which  spoke  of  invisible  powers,  should  be  ex- 
plained away.  The  object  was  to  discover  how  many  of  its  elements 
might  be  preserved,  without  infringing  upon  the  ordinary  maxims 
of  the  times  in  reference  to  physics,  metaphysics,  and  ethics. 

Now  I  would  say,  in  reference  to  these  inquiries,  just  as  I  said 
in  reference  to  all  others  undertaken  at  the  same  period,  that  I  do 
not  believe  they  were  useless,  or  will  ultimately  be  mischievous.  If 
the  student  of  the  physics  of  the  seventeenth  century  perceive  that 
there  were  a  multitude  of  strange  theories  and  superstitions  then 
accumulated  and  accumulating,  wThichhad  need  by  some  whirlwind 
to  be  swept  away ;  the  student  of  theology  must  equally  confess 
that  a  number  of  hard,  dogmatical  abstractions  respecting  spiritual 
objects,  and,  not  least,  respecting  the  books  which  treat  of  these 
objects,  were  darkening  the  face  of  the  heavens,  and  making  men's 
path  along  their  common  earth  less  clear.  That  same  fiery  process 
would  be  necessary  for  the  destruction  of  these,  we  might  conjecture. 
Of  what  kind  it  should  be,  we  could  not  be  judges.  God  ordained 
that  it  should  be  this  destructive  analysis.  We  cannot  doubt  that 
what  He  appointed  was  best.  Many  obstructions  to  the  perception 
of  that  which  is  real  and  substantial  have  been  removed  out  of  the 
path  of  the  young  theologian  ;  it  is  his  own  fault  if  he  seeks  for 
them  again.  He  may,  if  he  will,  be  less  entangled  with  the  ab- 
stractions and  conceits  of  the  intellect  than  his  forefathers  were. 
And  in  this  case,  as  in  the  others  I  have  mentioned,  the  analysts 
have  conferred  this  great  blessing  on  us — they  have  proved  the  in- 
adequacy and  feebleness  of  their  method  to  explain  any  one  living 
fact,  or  to  lead  us  onward  to  any  one  important  discovery. 

When,  therefore,  the  objectors  of  whom  we  are  speaking,  say 
that  the  Bible  ought  to  be  tried  by  the  same  rules  as  other  books, 
we  can  perhaps  go  a  great  way  with  them,  provided  we  understand 
what  they  mean.    It  always,  I  believe,  will  be  tried  by  the  same 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


401 


standard  as  other  books  ;  that  is  to  say,  the  habits  of  mind  which 
we  cultivate  in  regard  to  one,  we  shall  cultivate  in  regard  to  the 
other.  When  all  books  are  merely  cut  up  into  their  elements,  the 
Bible  will  be  dealt  with  in  like  manner.  When  other  books,  and 
the  whole  series  of  books  which  constitute  the  literature  of  a  na- 
tion, are  contemplated  in  reference  to  their  principle  or  idea,  it  is 
utterly  impossible  but  that  these  should  be  studied  upon  the  same 
principle.  And  the  question  arises,  what  is  this  principle  or  idea  ? 
We  have  had  occasion  to  consider  that  view  of  it,  so  prevalent  in 
our  day,  which  tries  to  separate  the  idea  from  the  event,  to  exhibit 
the  one  as  common  to  all  ages,  the  other  as  its  mere  accidental 
temporary  clothing.  I  have  endeavoured  to  show  how  inadequate 
this  doctrine  is  to  account  for  the  phenomena  which  present  them- 
selves to  us  in  the  history  of  the  world  ;  how  it  turns  living  ideas 
into  mere  notions  and  apprehensions  of  our  minds,  and  so  legalizes 
and  stamps  with  authority  the  very  superstitions  from  which  it  seeks 
to  deliver  us ;  how  it  confounds  the  permanent  and  the  transitory 
in  the  very  attempt  to  distinguish  them  ;  how  it  destroys  human 
progress  in  the  very  attempt  to  assert  it.  If,  indeed,  it  were  possi- 
ble entirely  to  separate  this  modern  idealism  from  the  old  analytical 
method  which  it  professes  to  supersede  and  to  despise,  we  might 
easily  prove  the  insufficiency  of  either.  The  chief  strength  of  each 
lies  in  a  vague  notion  of  the  one  being  the  expansion  and  full  de- 
velopment of  the  other ;  in  a  loose  impression  that  the  belief  of 
inspiration,  of  miracles,  of  a  gospel  history,  which  had  been  par- 
tially subverted  by  the  one,  has  been  completely  subverted  by  the 
other. 

The  facts,  in  recent  German  history  especially,  which  prove 
that  the  ideal  system  could  not  have  been  produced  at  all,  if  it  had 
not  been  preceded  by  a  vehement  religious  protest  against  the  ana- 
lysts, are  not  known  or  not  heeded  j  and  we  are  asked  what  hope 
there  can  be  of  maintaining  our  obsolete  notions  respecting  a  divine 
order  and  a  divine  book,  when  each  age  has  furnished  its  own  pe- 
culiar and  appropriate  refutation  of  them.  Our  answer  is,  '  no  hope 
at  all,  if  what  you  call  our  notions  be  not  something:  more  than 
notions,  if  they  be  not  founded  on  eternal  principles  and  truths. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  belief  that  they  have  this  foundation 
is  strengthened,  not  weakened,  by  the  history  of  these  different 


402 


SIGNS  OF  A 


attempts  to  confute  them  ;  strengthened,  not  weakened,  by  the  fact, 
that  no  adequate  answer  has  been  offered  to  the  particular  charges 
against  the  Bible,  except  by  those  who  are  willing  to  speak  of  the 
Bible  in  the  way  it  seems  to  speak  of  itself,  as  the  revelation  of  a 
divine  kingdom.' 

I.  Looking  at  it  in  this  light,  I  would  inquire,  first,  what  diffi- 
culties there  are  in  the  old  notion  that  the  writers  of  the  book  were 
inspired  men  ?  According  to  the  principle  of  a  spiritual  kingdom, 
as  we  have  considered  it,  inspiration  is  not  a  strange  anomalous  fact; 
it  is  the  proper  law  and  order  of  the  world  ;  no  man  ought  to  write, 
or  speak,  or  think,  except  under  the  acknowledgment  of  an  inspi- 
ration ;  no  man  can  speak,  or  write,  or  think,  if  he  have  not  really 
an  inspiration.  Is,  then,  the  constant  habitual  confession  of  divine 
teaching,  the  reference  of  every  thing  to  God  by  the  writers  of  this 
Bible,  something  which  stamps  them  with  the  character  of  impos- 
tors ?  Would  not  this  seem  to  be  the  characteristic  of  true  men  ? 
But  still  you  say  '  it  is  the  characteristic  of  fanatics,  of  those  who 
are  not  true  men ;  where  do  you  draw  the  line  V  I  draw  it  in 
this  way  :  I  say,  according  to  the  principle  of  a  spiritual  king- 
dom, every  man  who  is  doing  the  work  he  is  set  to  do,  may  believe 
that  he  is  inspired  with  a  power  to  do  that  work ;  every  man  who 
is  doing  some  other  work  which  he  is  not  set  to  do,  may,  indeed, 
say  that  he  is  using  powers  which  he  has  received  from  above  ;  but 
he  is  violating  the  purposes  for  which  those  powers  have  been  given 
him  ;  his  will  is  obeying  an  impulse  contrary  to  the  will  of  the 
Being  who  bestowed  the  power.  Here  is  fanaticism,  here  is  con- 
fusion. The  question,  therefore,  is  not  really,  Were  these  men  who 
wrote  the  Scriptures  inspired  by  God  1  but,  Were  they  in  a  certain 
position  and  appointed  to  a  certain  work  ?  So  that  we  are  driven 
by  this  argument,  as  we  are  driven  by  the  book  itself,  from  that 
which  we  read  to  that  which  we  read  of.  Was  there  such  a  soci- 
ety as  that  which  this  book  speaks  of?  was  there  such  a  nation  as 
the  Jews  ?  had  they  a  history  ?  was  there  a  meaning  in  that  his- 
tory ?  does  this  book  explain  to  us  their  history  and  its  meaning  ? 
The  question  of  inspiration  belongs  to  these  questions — cannot  be 
viewed  apart  from  them.  If  there  be  no  spiritual  kingdom  in  the 
world,  no  kings,  priests,  prophets  appointed  by  God,  then  assuredly 
I  cannot  make  out  that  the  Scriptures  had  a  right  to  describe  such 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY.  403 

kings,  and  priests,  and  prophets.  If  there  were  such  men,  I  have 
as  great  difficulty  in  understanding  how  we  can  dispense  with  such 
a  record,  or  how  any  Being,  save  He  who  formed  the  society  for 
the  sake  of  his  own  glory  and  for  the  good  of  his  creatures,  can 
nave  caused  that  book  to  be  written. 

But  it  will  be  answered,  '  This  is  evading  the  difficulty.  It  is 
not  merely  the  rren,  but  the  words,  which,  according  to  the  com- 
mon theory,  are  inspired.  And  though  less  extravagant  theories 
may  have  been  invented  and  received  among  Christians,  yet  none 
which  denies  a  verbal  inspiration  or  dictation  is  consistent  with 
itself,  is  any  thing  but  a  subterfuge.'  Two  words  are  used  here  as 
synonymous,  which  seem  to  me  to  involve  the  most  different  signi- 
fications. When  y,ou  speak  to  me  of  verbal  inspiration,  though  I 
do  not  like  the  phrase,  though  it  seems  to  me  to  involve  a  violent — 
a  scarcely  grammatical — ellipsis,  yet  I  subscribe  most  unequivocally 
to  the  meaning  which  I  suppose  is  latent  in  it.  I  have  no  notion 
of  inspired  thoughts  which  do  not  find  for  themselves  a  suitable 
clothing  of  words.  I  can  scarcely,  even  in  my  mind,  separate  the 
language  of  a  writer  from  his  meaning.  And  I  certainly  find  this 
difficulty  greater  in  studying  a  book  of  the  Bible  than  in  studying 
any  other  book.  The  peculiarities  of  its  language  seem  to  me 
strangely  significant.  And  yet  its  greatest  peculiarity  of  all,  if  I 
may  be  pardoned  the  solecism,  is  its  universality,  its  capacity  of 
translation  into  any  dialect  which  has  a  living  and  human  quality, 
which  is  not  merely  the  echo  of  passing  impressions  and  the  utter- 
ance of  animal  necessities.  But  just  because  I  see  this  link  between 
the  imbreathed  thought  and  the  spoken  word,  I  must  reject  as  mon- 
strous and  heretical  the  notion  of  a  dictation.  I  call  it  monstrous 
and  heretical,  for  I  know  none  more  directly  at  variance  with  the 
letter  and  spirit  of  Scripture.  If  the  hint  of  it  is  to  be  found  any- 
where, it  is  certainly  in  the  history  of  the  giving  of  the  divine  code. 
That  was,  of  course,  a  formal  literal  document,  and  therefore  is  sig- 
nified to  proceed  formally  and  literally  from  its  Author.  Yet  mark 
how  carefully  we  are  warned  against  the  notion,  so  natural  to  the 
sensual  and  idolatrous  heart  of  man,  that  Moses  was  a  mere  me- 
chanical utterer  or  transcriber.  Why  are  we  told  that  he  went 
into  the  thick  darkness  ?  why  do  we  hear  of  his  awful  communion 
for  forty  days  ?  why  have  we  the  records  of  his  deep  sympathy 


• 


404  SIGNS  OF  A 

with  his  people,  of  his  prayers,  his  meditations,  his  murmurings,  if 
not  that  we  may  be  exalted  to  understand  something  of  the  human 
privilege  of  spiritual  intercourse,  and  that  we  may  consider  this  the 
great  privilege  of  the  most  honoured  seer  ?  And  this  surely  is  the 
object  of  all  Scripture,  if  it  have  any  object  at  all,  to  withdraw  u% 
from  outward  sensual  impressions  of  the  divine  Majesty,  to  make 
us  feel  the  reality  of  the  relation  between  Him  and  his  creatures,  to 
make  us  understand  that  it  is  a  spiritual  relation,  and  that,  therefore, 
it  can  manifest  itself  in  outward  words  and  acts.  It  is,  then,  no 
concession  to  the  Rationalist,  but  a  necessity  of  our  own  faith,  that 
we  should  utterly  reject  and  abhor  this  theory  of  dictation.  And  it 
remains  for  him  to  show  how  the  discovery  of  different  readings  in 
MSS.,  or  the  rejection  of  books  as  not  genuine,  which  are  now 
esteemed  to  be  parts  of  the  Canon,  or  even  the  detection  of  histori- 
cal inconsistencies  and  mistakes  in  the  inspired  writers,  would  affect 
our  belief.  With  regard  to  the  new  readings,  just  in  proportion  to 
our  feeling  of  the  importance  and  sacredness  of  the  language,  must 
be  our  desire  to  find  what  it  really  is.  If  there  be  no  Bible,  these 
investigations  are  idle  and  useless ;  if  there  be,  they  must  be  most 
interesting.  The  mental  exercise  in  such  inquiries  must  be  most 
healthful,  involving,  if  it  be  rightly  conducted,  the  necessity  of  re- 
flection upon  the  whole  mind  and  scope  of  the  text,  a  cautious  and 
calm  use  of  the  judging  faculty,  a  faith  in  the  existence  of  truth, 
and  in  its  willingness  to  reveal  itself.  Again  :  any  person  who 
really  believes  that  there  is  a  book,  of  which  the  distinct  office  is  to 
explain  the  nature  and  conditions  of  a  kingdom  into  which  he  has 
been  actually  brought,  must  enter  upon  the  inquiry  whether  any 
one  of  the  documents  of  which  this  book  is  supposed  to  consist  be 
or  be  not  genuine,  in  the  same  simple  and  honest  spirit.  The  king- 
dom exists  ;  he  is  not  afraid  of  losing  it  or  of  losing  his  place  in  it, 
even  if  God  thought  fit  to  take  away  the  book  altogether.  Yet  he 
has  no  fear  that  He  will  do  this,  no  doubt  in  the  wTorld  that  it  is  his 
good  pleasure  to  tell  us  what  He  is  and  what  we  are.  That  this 
book  has  revealed  these  truths  to  himself  and  to  thousands  of  others 
for  generations,  he  is  certain  ;  whether  he  or  they  have  been  right 
in  supposing  that  a  particular  portion  of  it  was  necessary  to  the 
rest,  he  is  willing  reverently  and  diligently  to  consider ;  nothing 
doubting  that  He  who  upholds  the  kingdom  and  has  given  the  book, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


405 


will  not  allow  the  ultimate  continuance  of  any  intruder  into  it,  or 
permit  any  integral  part  of  it  to  be  taken  away.  And  if  it  be 
asked,  But  does  not  this  admission  open  a  door  to  unlimited  skepti- 
cism ?  has  not  nearly  every  book  been  the  subject  of  some  modern 
suspicion  % — the  answer,  I  think,  has  been  given  already.  Let 
those  talk  to  me  about  interpolations  in  Shakspeare  who  know  what 
Shakspeare  is,  who  have  really  studied  his  mind  and  writings.  I 
do  not  care  the  least  because  Theobald  or  Pope  may  determine  that 
such  and  such  passages  are  not  suitable  to  their  taste ;  neither  do  I 
care  in  the  least  wrhat  may  be  the  taste  of  the  analysts  or  the  modern 
idealists  about  passages  or  books  of  Scripture.  Their  taste  is  no 
law  of  criticism.  I  believe  it  to  be  a  very  low  and  bad  taste  indeed. 
Let  them  bring  forward  external  evidence  and  we  will  weigh  it — 
cautiously,  because  their  taste  is  very  apt  to  mingle  with  their 
words,  because  they  continually  assume  a  maxim  from  which  we 
utterly  dissent,  as  if  it  were  part  and  parcel  of  a  fact  which  we  may 
acknowledge  ;  but  still  earnestly  and  impartially.  I  am  not  the 
least  afraid  of  touching  a  corner  of  the  edifice  because  the  rest  is 
likely  to  fall  down  ;  on  the  contrary,  I  believe  it  will  prove  to  be  a 
much  firmer  edifice  than  we  have  been  wont  to  suppose  that  it  is. 
The  books  which  were  thrown  aside,  even  by  religious  men,  at  the 
time  of  the  Reformation,  because  they  seemed  to  have  no  direct 
bearing  upon  individual  life,  will  be  found  to  contain  their  own 
evidence,  when  they  are  looked  upon  as  meant  to  develope  the  order 
and  life  of  the  spiritual  kingdom. 

The  same  principle  precisely  applies  to  alleged  mistakes  or  incon- 
sistencies in  the  admitted  parts  of  the  records.  Suppose  these  mis- 
takes and  inconsistencies  to  be  such  as  prove  dishonesty  in  the  wri- 
ters— suppose  them  to  be  connected  with  any  part  of  the  revelation 
of  the  character  of  God  or  the  development  of  his  kingdom — they 
fall  under  the  last  head,  they  become  {pro  tanto)  arguments  against 
the  genuineness  of  that  document  wherein  they  are  found.  Sup- 
pose them  to  be  merely  accidental  to  the  narrative,  such  as  do  not 
affect  the  meaning  of  the  facts  or  the  integrity  of  the  writer,  or  such 
as  may  be  corrected  by  comparison  with  another  narrative  of  the 
same  transactions,  then  I  do  not  know  that  I  have  any  right,  a  priori, 
to  affirm  from  the  existence  of  a  Bible  that  none  such  will  exist.  I 
see  no  promise  to  that  effect;  I  see  no  reason  why  it  may  not  have 


406 


SIGNS  OF  A 


pleased  God  to  teach  men  by  this  very  means ;  I  mean,  to  permit  the 
ordinary  differences  of  opinions  and  eyesight  which  manifest  them- 
selves in  the  testimony  of  different  witnesses  of  a  fact,  to  be  helps 
to  us  in  the  study  of  the  real  character  of  that  fact;  the  ordinary 
confusion  respecting  points  of  detail  to  be  the  means  of  leading  us 
away  from  those  points  of  detail  to  that  which  is  real  and  substan- 
tial. I  say,  T  can  see  no  reason,  a  priori,  either  in  the  nature  of  a 
Bible  or  in  the  meaning  of  inspiration,  why  this  may  not  be  so.  I 
even  fancy  that  I  can  see  reasons  in  the  analogy  of  the  Divine  deal- 
ings, and  in  the  tendency  of  man  to  dwell  upon  the  minutiae  of  a 
transaction,  not  as  helps  to  discover  its  real  meaning  and  essence,  but 
for  their  own  sakes,  why  such  a  discipline  may  be  most  suited  to  us. 
If  it  should  be  found  that  this  is  not  the  case,  I  shall  acquiesce  most 
readily,  but  I  shall  have  no  more  faith  in  the  Bible  than  I  have  at 
present.  For  the  Bible  will  not  allow  me  to  have  any  faith  in  it 
apart  from  faith  in  God,  and  whatever  I  find  to  be  his  way  of  train- 
ing me  and  my  race,  that  I  hold  to  be  the  right  way,  and  the  way 
in  which  we  may  be  trained  to  all  goodness  and  all  truth.  I  do  not 
want  to  lay  down  a  scheme  or  chart  of  the  road  in  which  it  is  fitting 
we  should  be  led  ;  that,  I  think,  is  presumption. 

According  to  this  showing,  then,  the  charge  of  departing  from 
the  ordinary  rules  which  we  apply  to  the  study  of  other  books,  is  far 
more  applicable  to  those  who  urge  it  than  it  is  to  us.  We  claim 
that  the  Bible  should  be  looked  at  as  a  fact,  a  most  pregnant  fact, 
in  the  history  of  mankind.  It  stands  apart  from  other  books ;  we 
wish  to  know  why  it  so  stands  apart,  what  there  is  that  differences 
it  from  other  books,  just  hs  we  wish  to  know  what  there  is  in  the 
writings  of  Cicero  that  differences  them  from  other  writings,  or  what 
there  is  in  the  literature  of  Rome  that  differences  it  from  other  lite- 
rature. And  if  we  should  discover  that  there  is  that  in  this  book 
which  entitles  it  to  be  called,  as  it  has  been  commonly  called,  The 
Book,  or  The  Book  of  Books,  we  do  not  surely  by  such  a  name  sig- 
nify any  contempt  of  books — rather  a  high  appreciation  of  them. 
We  declare  that  there  is  a  book  which  directly  and  formally  connects 
letters  with  the  life  of  man,  with  the  order  of  God ;  a  book,  which, 
just  so  far  as  it  fulfils  its  idea,  becomes  the  key  by  which  all  other 
books  may  be  interpreted,  that  which  translates  them  into  signifi- 
cance and  determines  the  value  and  position  of  each.    We  declare, 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


407 


moreover,  what  is  the  temper  and  spirit  in  which  a  book  should  be 
studied.  Nothing  seems  to  me  more  preposterous  than  the  notion, 
that  we  can  change  our  habits  of  mind  when  we  turn  from  one  sub- 
ject to  another.  It  is  a  flagrant  violation  of  every  ethical  principle, 
that  is  to  say,  a  flagrant  tampering  with  our  moral  being,  to  sup- 
pose that  we  can  be  reverent  at  one  moment  and  irreverent  at  ano- 
ther ;  that  we  are  to  be  humble  in  the  presence  of  this  person,  and 
proud  when  we  are  brought  into  intercourse  with  another.  I  per- 
fectly agree,  therefore,  with  the  Rationalist,  that  to  talk  as  some  do 
of  our  right  to  sit  in  judgment  upon  all  other  books,  and  of  the  duty 
of  submitting  our  judgments  to  the  Bible,  is  not  practical  or  reason- 
able. If  we  think  that  in  reading  Cicero  or  Shakspeare  our  proper 
position  is  that  of  judges,  I  am  quite  certain  that  we  shall  not  be 
able  to  think  otherwise  when  we  study  the  Scriptures.  And  I  am 
equally  certain  that  while  we  do  fancy  that  we  are  judges  of  Cicero 
or  Shakspeare  we  shall  not  understand  them.  The  posture  of 
children  or  learners  is  the  true  profitable  posture  in  all  cases.  It  is 
not  safe  to  propose  to  ourselves  the  end  of  being  judges  in  any  case- 
It  is  not  safe  for  our  minds  generally,  it  is  most  unsafe  for  the  judg- 
ing faculty  itself.  That  is  invariably  turned  awry  at  first,  blunted 
and  stupified  afterwards,  if  it  be  not  sent  to  school,  and  if  it  do  not 
carry  through  life  the  docility  which  school  is  meant  to  give  it.  But 
what  is  the  schooling?  We  all  know  how  difficult  the  acquisition 
of  docility  is,  how  difficult  in  all  days,  how  difficult  especially  in  our 
own.  There  are  some  books  which  naturally  tempt  us  to  exercise 
the  proud  condemning  spirit;  feebleness  is  stamped  upon  them;  they 
themselves  affect  a  right  to  judge  others ;  we  feel  as  if  here  we 
might  safely  indulge  our  propensity.  Therefore  we  see  the  wisdom 
of  the  old  notion,  that  only  the  best  books,  only  those  which  carry 
a  kind  of  authority  with  them,  should  be  set  before  boys ;  when  they 
have  been  drilled  by  them  into  habits  of  deference  and  humility,  then 
they  may  venture,  if  their  calling  requires  it,  upon  the  study  of  the 
worst,  for  then  they  will  have  acquired  the  true  discerning  spirit, 
that  spirit  of  which  the  judging  spirit  is  the  counterfeit;  the  one 
perceiving  the  real  quality  of  the  food  which  is  offered,  the  other, 
merely  setting  up  its  own  partial  and  immature  tastes  and  aversions 
as  the  standard  of  what  is  good  and  evil.  But  even  this  is  not  suffi- 
cient, as  experience  has  proved.    Starting  from  the  study  of  the 


408 


SIGNS  OF  A 


meanest  books,  our  modern  critics  have  gone  on  to  higher  books, 
and  have  asked  why  they  may  not  exercise  their  right  of  private 
judgment  on  one  as  much  as  the  other.  Why  they  may  not  pro- 
nounce their  sentence  upon  Herodotus  or  Livy  as  well  as  upon  any 
modern  compilation  ?  The  Rationalist  goes  a  step  further,  and  says, 
Why  not  pass  our  sentence  upon  those  which  you  call  your  inspired 
books  as  well  as  upon  Herodotus  or  Livy  ?  It  is  good  that  such  a 
question  should  be  proposed,  because  it  brings  the  question  to  an 
issue.  It  enables  us  to  say,  You  have  wanted  to  get  rid  of  these  in- 
spired books,  because,  you  have  said,  they  were  an  affront  to  other 
literature;  learn  by  this  that  they  are  the  needful  protectors  to  other 
literature.  If  there  be  a  book,  of  which  wre  can  say,  Herein  God 
is  speaking  to  you ;  be  silent  and  listen :  we  have  the  power  of  keep- 
ing down  that  saucy  and  insolent  temper,  which,  so  far  as  it  is  ap- 
plied to  any  thing,  makes  that  thing  unintelligible.  We  have  the 
power  of  cultivating  your  judgment,  because  we  have  the  power  of 
making  it  not  a  private  judgment.  A  private  judgment  means,  the 
judgment  of  a  man  who  is  cut  off  from  his  fellows,  the  judgment  of 
a  savage.  A  man  certainly  has  a  right  to  such  a  private  judgment, 
if  by  right  you  mean  the  power  to  exercise  it.  For  he  has  the 
power  of  being  a  savage ;  he  has  the  power  of  saying,  I  will  not 
be  educated ;  I  will  not  be  led  out  of  my  own  partial  apprehensions, 
and  the  partial  apprehensions  of  my  age;  I  will  not  be  a  reasona- 
ble being,  I  will  not  be  a  man.  He  may  do  this ;  I  say  also  he  may 
do  something  else  if  he  will.  He  may  be  taken  under  training  and 
discipline,  the  training  and  discipline  of  God  himself,  for  the  pur- 
pose of  being  led  out  of  his  private  judgment,  into  a  knowledge  of 
the  judgment  and  mind  of  Him  who  "  weighed  the  mountains  in 
scales  and  the  hills  in  a  balance."  He  may  have  a  book  set  before 
him,  which  unfolds  the  scheme  and  purpose  of  this  universe  and  its 
Creator ;  he  may  be  led  by  slow  degrees  to  understand  his  own  con- 
nexion with  this  universe,  with  those  who  lived  in  it,  and  with  Him 
who  is  the  author  of  it.  And  if  he  will  have  this  learning,  if  he 
will  be  taught  out  of  this  book,  then  every  other  book  which  he 
reads  will  be  also  a  part  of  the  same  divine  institution.  God  will 
be  training  him  by  that  too ;  to  trace  out  the  course  of  his  govern- 
ment, to  see  how  different  men  have,  consciously  or  unconsciously, 
cheerfully  or  involuntarily,  been  accomplishing  some  part  of  his  de- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


409 


signs  towards  his  creatures;  till  having  descended  through  different 
gradations  of  thoughtful  inquirers,  who,  each  in  his  own  department, 
are  humbly  desiring  to  discover  the  meaning  of  their  Lord,  when  he 
comes,  at  last,  to  the  lowest  point  in  the  scale,  to  the  last  new  criti- 
cism, or  the  last  tavern  speech  in  defence  of  the  inalienable  right  of 
men  to  think  what  they  like,  he  will  find  even  in  that  something 
which  is  true,  something  which  could  not  have  been  spoken  if  there 
were  not  a  Bible  in  the  world. 

2.  This  view  of  the  relation  between  the  Scriptures  and  other 
books,  may  perhaps  assist  us  in  considering  the  question  of  miracles. 
The  analyst  of  the  last  century  maintained  that  these  miracles  might 
be  referred  to  natural  causes.  The  idealist  of  the  present  day  con- 
siders thern  as  inventions  attesting  that  belief  of  something  super- 
natural which  belongs  to  men  because  they  have  spiritual  faculties. 
Both  alike  agree,  that  they  are  stumbling-blocks  and  not  helps  to  a 
belief  the  doctrines  and  facts  of  Scripture.  I  cannot  regret  that 
either  of  these  opinions  has  been  propounded.  Unphilosophical  as 
I  think  them,  they  yet  may  clear  our  minds  of  a  great  confusion, 
and  may  help  us  in  arriving  at  a  great  truth.  We  have  been  used 
to  speak  of  miracles  as  the  chief  evidences  for  the  truth  of  Chris- 
tianity. Now  if  it  is  meant  by  this,  that  a  miracle  or  prodigy,  as 
such,  proves  the  divine  commission  of  the  person  who  enacts  it,  we 
have  the  strongest  reason  for  rejecting  such  a  notion,  for  the  Bible 
commands  us  to  reject  it.  We  dare  not  believe  any  thing  merely 
because  something  which  strikes  us  as  a  departure  from  ordinary 
experiences  or  laws  is  done  to  confirm  it;  we  are  warned  in  Scrip- 
ture, that  we  shall  see  such  wonders,  and  that  we  are  to  be  aware 
of  being  deceived  by  them.  Again,  the  Bible  is  remarkably  a  book 
of  laws,  a  book  explaining  the  divine  order  of  the  universe;  if  it 
be  not  this  it  is  nothing.  Can  we  suppose  that  violations  of  laws, 
infringements  of  order,  would  be  the  great  signs  and  witnesses  in 
confirmation  of  it  ?  Surely,  then,  the  eagerness  of  the  analyst  to 
get  these  miracles  resolved  into  natural  causes,  that  is,  according  to 
his  notion,  to  get  them  connected  with  the  general  order  of  the 
world,  is  not  surprising.  But,  once  more,  it  is  quite  true,  as  the 
other  class  of  rationalists  affirm,  that  there  has  been  a  feeling,  not 
at  one  time  and  in  one  age,  but  at  all  times  and  in  all  ages,  after  some 
power  which  is  not  circumscribed  by  the  rules  of  ordinary  visible 


410 


SIGNS  OF  A 


experience,  but  which  is  superior  to  these  rules,  and  can  transgress 
them.  He  is  quite  right,  that  the  acknowledgment  of  such  a  power 
lies  deep  in  the  heart  of  man,  and  that  we  are  continually  demand- 
ing instances  and  proofs  of  its  exercise.  Both  these  assertions  are 
true ;  the  difficulty  is  to  reconcile  them  and  apply  them. 

Now,  supposing  the  Bible  were  the  revelation  of  a  spiritual 
kingdom  or  constitution  for  man,  such  as  we  have  described ;  sup- 
posing it  were  the  history  of  a  divine  power  for  the  redemption  of 
man  out  of  a  slavery  into  which  he  had  brought  himself,  we  may 
perceive,  I  think,  at  least  a  dawn  of  light  upon  this  controversy. 
I  do  find,  unquestionably,  in  the  portents  recorded  by  Livy,  the  signs 
of  a  feeling  in  men's  minds  that  there  is  something  supernatural ; 
that  the  powers  of  the  world  are  not  all  with  which  men  have  to 
deal.  But  the  feeling  contradicts  itself  in  the  attempt  to  utter  itself ; 
it  does  homage  to  the  powers  of  nature  in  the  very  act  of  seeming 
to  rise  above  them.  And,  therefore,  under  such  a  system  there 
could  be  no  liberty  for  the  human  spirit,  there  could  be  no  brave  in- 
vestigation into  the  mechanism  or  into  the  energies  of  the  universe. 
Before  these  blessings  could  be  attained,  the  sense  of  the  superna- 
tural in  man  must  be  justified  and  purified.  He  must  know  that 
when  he  is  dreaming  of  something  above  himself,  he  is  dreaming 
of  a  reality ;  he  must  know  that  nature  is  not  that  which  he  is 
dreaming  of;  that  he  is  not  to  tremble  before  this,  but  to  claim  the 
dignity  of  a  spiritual  creature,  to  understand  it  and  to  subdue  it. 
He  must  know  that  he  is  not  the  victim  of  a  set  of  blind  natural 
agents ;  he  must  have  something  more  than  a  vague  conception  of 
what  that  power  is,  of  which  he  is  the  servant.  Such  an  effect, 
I  say,  the  miracles  of  the  Bible  may  produce  upon  him.  Every 
one  of  those  which  is  recorded  in  the  Old  Testament  is  recorded 
expressly  as  a  witness,  that  the  Jehovah,  the  I  am,  the  personal  God, 
the  Lord  of  the  spirits  of  all  flesh,  is  the  King  of  the  world,  and 
that  gods  of  sense  are  not  its  kings.  Every  miracle  recorded  in 
the  New  Testament  is  recorded  expressly  and  professedly  for  the 
purpose  of  showing  that  the  Son  of  man  is  the  Ruler  of  the  winds 
and  the  waves;  the  sustainer  and  restorer  of  animal  life;  the 
healer  and  tamer  of  the  human  spirit;  and  that  those  who  are  the 
adopted  children  of  God  in  Him,  while  they  are  doing  his  work, 
are  not  the  servants  of  visible  things,  but  their  rulers.    These  mira- 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


411 


cles  say  to  the  poor  man,  "Fear  not  the  mighty  unfathomable  ocean, 
for  your  King  and  Friend  has  calmly  walked  upon  it ;  fear  not  the 
powers  of  disease  and  sickness,  for  He  who  took  your  flesh  has 
mastered  them ;  fear  not  the  more  terrible  powers  that  get  the  mas- 
tery of  the  understanding  and  heart,  for  Christ  also  hath  cast  out 
devils :  walk  boldly  and  bravely  over  this  earth,  as  freemen  united 
to  this  triumphant  Deliverer ;  dread  only  separation  from  Him ; 
dread  only  that  you  should  not  trust  Him  and  cleave  to  Him  suffi- 
ciently, and  so  sink  again  under  the  bondage  to  nature  and  death, 
out  of  which  He,  by  his  life  and  death,  has  purchased  you."  And 
do  not  they  speak  also  to  the  better  taught  man  according  to  his 
necessities  and  temptations  ?  He  does  not  so  much  want  to  be 
raised  above  the  natural  fear  of  outward  things ;  a  calculation  of 
probabilities,  or  a  habit  of  encountering  difficulties  may  easily  give 
him  that  victory.  But  the  very  means  of  his  deliverance  are  occa- 
sions to  him  of  fresh  bondage.  He  acquires  a  drowsy,  dull  sense 
of  an  ever-moving  system  of  chances;  he  does  not  become  an 
idolater  of  the  powers  of  nature  ;  but  he  worships  its  evenness  and 
persistency.  Most  wretched  and  degrading  faith  !  far  more  to  be 
loathed  and  dreaded  than  the  living  and  half-human  idolatry  of  the 
peasant.  Yet  unless  there  be  some  demonstration  that  spiritual 
power  is  superior  to  mechanical;  that  the  world  is  subject  to  God, 
and  not  to  chance  or  nature ;  that  there  is  an  order,  far  more  beau- 
tiful and  perfect  than  that  of  sun  and  stars,  in  which  men  are  in- 
tended to  abide,  and  in  which  every  thing  that  is  great  and  noble 
within  them  receives  its  full  development ; — I  see  not  how  this  ma- 
terialist superstition  can  fail  to  become  the  Creed  of  every  nation, 
and  to  bring  about  the  decay  of  all  institutions  and  political  life,  all 
feeling,  affection,  hope.  With  the  other  faith  it  has  been  possible 
for  men  to  pursue  physical  science.  The  world  has  presented  itself 
to  them  as  a  solemn,  awful  subject  of  study,  but  not  as  a  tyrant 
before  which  they  must  bow.  They  have  learnt  that  the  mere  cus- 
tomary links  which  connect  a  fact  with  its  highest  principle,  may 
be  suspended  for  the  purpose  of  making  that  principle  manifest. 
They  have,  therefore,  risen  above  the  slavish  notion,  that  sensible 
experience  is  the  law  to  which  things  are  subjecte  d ;  they  have 
been  able  to  set  it  at  nought  and  defy  it ;  not  merely  the  astrono- 
mer, but  every  chemist  who  has  truly  investigated  the  functions  and 


412 


SIGNS  OF  A 


powers  of  material  things,  has  moved  on  in  this  line,  humbly  asking 
nature  to  tell  hirn  her  secrets,  and  receiving  answers,  the  most  satis- 
factory indeed,  but  the  most  contrary  to  our  sensible  anticipations 
and  conclusions. 

If,  then,  we  are  asked  why  we  reject  the  analyst's  doctrine  about 
these  miracles,  our  answer  is,  because  by  accepting  it  we  should 
not  be  acknowledging  the  true  order  of  the  world,  but  we  should 
be  refusing  to  acknowledge  it.  We  do  not  believe  that  the  world 
is  under  the  government  of  natural  causes  ;  we  do  not  know  what 
the  phrase  '  natural  causes'  means.  We  confess,  and  rejoice  to 
confess,  that  there  is  an  habitual  appointed  course  of  things;  that 
each  agent,  Voluntary  or  involuntary,  has  his  proper  place  in  the 
scheme ;  that  no  one  link  of  this  agency  will  be  ever  needlessly 
broken  or  dispensed  with.  But  we  say  that  no  dishonour  is  put  upon 
any  of  these  agents,  when  He,  who  has  assigned  them  their  place, 
keeps  them  in  their  own  relation  to  each  other,  imparts  to  them 
their  powers,  withdraws  the  veil  which  conceals  Himself  the  prime 
worker,  and  so  explains  the  meaning  of  his  ordinances,  the  secret  of 
their  efficiency,  the  reason  of  their  abuse.  It  is  in  this  sense  that 
we  say  the  miracles  are  evidences  of  the  truth  of  Christianity.  If 
Christianity  be  the  manifestation  of  a  spiritual  kingdom ;  if  it  be 
the  satisfaction  of  the  dreams  of  past  ages ;  if  it  be  that  which  was 
to  exhibit  through  all  the  complications  of  after  ages,  what  is  the 
law  which  governs  them,  and  who  is  the  Giver  of  that  law,  then 
we  cannot  see  how  it  could  enter  the  world  without  miracles,  or 
how  those  miracles  should  not  be  such  as  the  Bible  affirms  that 
they  M  ere.* 

3.  The  records  of  these  miracles  form  such  an  integral  portion 
of  the  Gospel  narratives,  that  in  speaking  of  the  one  I  have  neces- 
sarily anticipated  many  of  the  remarks  which  I  should  have  made 
upon  the  other. 

The  real  difficulty  which  has  presented  itself  to  men's  minds  in 
the  study  of  these  has  been  this,  *  How  can  we  admit  narratives 

*  Every  reader  of  the  Gospels  will  of  course  have  observed,  that  our  Lord's  signs 
did  not  satisfy  the  rulers  of  the  Jews.  They  wanted  another  kind  of  signs,  'signs  from 
heaven,'  glaring  tokens  which  the  eye  might  recognise,  not  '  powers'  exercised  upon 
the  inner  man,  and  calling  forth  an  effort  of  the  spirit  in  answer  to  them.  Beautifully 
do  our  Lord's  words  express  the  difference,  'It  is  a  sinful  and  adulterous,  or  sense-bound» 
generation  which  seeks  after  such  signs.' 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


413 


which  report  such  very  strange  stories  to  be  true,  without  some 
higher  evidence  than  belongs  to  almost  any  other  writing."  This 
suggestion  being  once  offered,  of  course  every  difficulty  which  har- 
monists have  experienced,  in  bringing  the  parts  of  the  different 
narratives  into  connexion,  every  doubt  which  has  been  raised  re- 
specting the  authorship  of  any  one  of  them,  every  question  about 
the  existence  of  a  common  source  from  which  they  may  have  pro- 
ceeded, has  given  new  encouragement  to  skepticism.  It  has  been 
said,  '  so  far  from  there  being  more  evidence,  it  would  seem  as  if 
there  were  less  evidence  for  these  than  for  the  other  parts  of  the 
record.' 

Now  our  last  inquiry  seems  to  lead  us  to  these  conclusions. 
Either  the  strange  stories  spoken  of  are  in  accordance  with  the 
scriptural  idea  of  the  Founder  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  kingdom, 
or  they  are  not.  If  they  are  not,  no  evidence  whatever  could 
establish  the  authenticity  of  the  document  containing  them;  for 
they  would  be  self-contradictory;  we  should  be  bound  to  reject 
them  because  we  believe  in  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  they  are,  we  should  require  evidence  to  account  for 
their  omission  in  any  record  professing  to  contain  the  history  of 
such  a  person.  We  should  have  a  right  to  ask,  Why  did  he  give 
no  signs  that  he  came  to  connect  the  visible  with  the  invisible 
world ;  why  did  he  do  nothing  to  .break  the  yoke  of  custom  and 
experience;  nothing  to  show  men  that  the  constitution  which  he 
pretended  to  reveal  and  establish  has  a  true  foundation  ?  Take 
away  the  miracles,  and  there  is  an  inexplicable  chasm  and  incon- 
sistency in  these  records,  which  it  would  require  a  vast  amount  of 
wit  and  ingenuity  to  explain.* 

Now  when  this  difficulty  is  surmounted,  when  the  reader  of 
the  Gospels  is  not  haunted  perpetually  with  the  thought,  *  I  wish 

*  We  are  told  sometimes  that  Mahomet  understood  the  true  nature  of  miracles 
far  better  than  the  Apostles  of  the  Christian  Church;  he  said,  4  The  corn  growing 
was  a  miracle,  the  rise  of  the  sun  was  a  miracb,  life  and  death  were  miracles,'  &c. 
Very  likely  he  did,  and  they  were  very  fine  words  no  doubt.  The  question  is,  what  effect 
have  they  produced  ?  Have  his  best  disciples  been  able,  were  they  able  even  in  the 
highest  times  of  Arabian  cultivation,  to  rise  above  the  prejudices  and  illusions  of  sensi- 
sible  experience?  But  the  fact  of  the  difference  is  important.  It  shows  how  closely 
the  kind  of  miracles  recorded  in  Scripture  belongs  to  the  idea  of  the  Incarnation.  Re- 
jecting that  idea,  Mahometans  rightly  reject  the  signs  and  forms  which  connect  the  visi- 
ble with  the  invisible  worfd.    And  there  is  the  secret  of  their  slavery. 

27 


414 


SIGNS  OF  A 


that  story  were  away ;  I  wish  I  could  have  the  morality  of  these 
discourses,  and  the  morality  of  the  life  of  Jesus,  without  being  per- 
petually asked  to  acknowledge  something  marvellous,7  when  he 
has  seen  that  the  marvel  belongs  essentially  to  the  morality  of  the 
discourses  and  of  the  life,  the  other  perplexities,  I  believe,  will  not 
be  very  serious.  In  the  first  place,  he  will  see  that  all  the  failures 
of  harmonists  to  bring  the  different  facts  of  the  different  Gospels 
into  connexion  or  chronological  sequence,  have  nothing  whatever 
to  do  with  the  books  themselves.  They  exist,  they  are  facts,  they 
have  exercised  a  wonderful  influence  on  the  world  in  their  present 
form,  they  have  made  knowTn  to  men  the  same  living  Person.  If 
they  should  be  found  to  fit  one  into  another,  or  to  be  contrived  as 
supplements  to  each  other,  [  do  not  see  that  they  would  accomplish 
their  purpose  better.  I  am  quite  willing  to  listen  to  those  who  say 
they  have  discovered  such  an  agreement  in  them,  and  to  believe 
them  if  they  make  their  point  good.  But  I  certainly  am  not  the 
least  troubled  when  I  see  them  at  fault. 

A  revelation  to  men  of  their  Lord  and  King,  must  be  something 
altogether  wonderful.  I  could  not  the  least  conjecture  beforehand 
how  the  records  of  it  would  be  composed.  They  might  come  in 
the  form  of  annals,  no  doubt.  That  is  not  the  form  from  which 
one  in  general  derives  most  knowledge  of  a  character ;  oftentimes 
the  story  of  a  few  days  or  hours  brings  it  into  clearer  light ;  still 
this  method  might  have  been  appropriate  for  such  an  occasion. 
But  if  another  has  apparently  been  adopted ;  if  I  am  in  possession 
of  a  set  of  documents,  seeming  to  present  to  me  a  life  in  a  number 
of  different  circumstances,  all  human  and  intelligible  circumstances, 
the  wonder  lying  not  in  them  but  in  him  who  is  acting  through 
them,  and  in  the  meaning  he  shows  to  be  latent  in  them,  and  if  I 
have  the  opportunity  of  comparing  these  documents,  so  that  I  may 
learn  more  of  the  meaning  of  the  life,  from  seeing  how  the  trans- 
actions which  exhibit  it  appeared  to  different  men,  I  am  certainly 
not  careful  to  disturb  this  order,  for  the  sake  of  inventing  another 
which  I  think  would  be  much  less  adapted  to  us.  So  again, 
secondly,  it  should  be  remembered  that  the  existence  of  these  do- 
cuments is  not  affected  by  any  theories  about  their  authorship  or 
their  construction.  Omit  all  the  names  which  we  are  wont  to  as- 
sociate with  them,  or  say  that  these  names  do  not  indicate  any 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


415 


known  persons,  or  that  these  persons  were  not  eye-witnesses,  or  that 
they  were  merely  reporters  of  a  current  tradition,  or  that  they  all 
drew  from  a  common  tradition,  or  that  they  had  communications 
with  one  another,  or  that  they  had  none — still  the  books  are;  and 
the  secret  of  their  influence,  and  the  strange  impression  which  men 
have,  that  they  do  exhibit  a  real  being  to  man,  and  that  Being  the 
Lord  of  man,  the  image  after  which  he  is  created ;  this  must  still  be 
explained,  either  by  means  of  some  one  of  these  hypotheses,  or  without 
it.  They  may  be  all  worth  considering ;  each,  doubtless,  means  some- 
thing, and  may  teach  something ;  but  if  they  should  all  prove  to  be  un- 
tenable, still  the  marvel  itself  is  not  got  rid  of.  To  that  the  theolo- 
gical student  must  address  himself;  he  must  look  it  fairly  in  the 
face,  he  must  confess  that  all  processes  of  his  criticism  must  be  pre- 
ceded by  the  acknowledgment  that  there  is  something  to  be  criti- 
cised. And  however  much  he  may  be  disposed  to  turn  away 
from  the  commonplace  remark,  that  there  is  a  singular  absence  in 
these  records  of  those  contrivances  by  which  men  usually  try  to  set 
forth  a  hero;  that  the  divinity  which  the  writer  believes  he  is  ex- 
hibiting, does  not  occasionally  but  habitually  exhibit  itself  in  the 
simplest  and  lowliest  forms  of  human  life  ;  that  there  is  actually  no 
exception  to  this  practice  in  any  one  of  these  narratives,  not  one  in- 
stance in  all  these  traditions  of  affectionate,  credulous,  ignorant  dis- 
ciples, of  an  attempt  to  establish  their  Master's  celestial  origin  by 
connecting  him  with  circumstances  of  outward  greatness;  however 
dull  and  dreary,  I  say,  the  repetition  of  such  remarks  may  be,  be- 
cause they  have  been  forced  upon  us  all  in  books  of  evidence,  be- 
cause we  have  learnt  them  by  rote,  before  they  came  out  to  us 
naturally  and  simply  as  characteristics  of  that  which  we  were 
reading,  yet  they  are  true  remarks,  and  can  as  little  be  passed  over 
by  any  thoughtful  reader,  as  any  peculiarity  in  the  style  of  an 
ancient  classic.  Therefore  we  find  an  evidently  growing  conviction 
in  the  minds  of  the  more  intelligent  skeptics,  that  there  must  be  a 
scheme  for  the  purpose  of  explaining  these  difficulties.  The  whole 
history  must  be  accounted  for,  not  merely  by  finding  fault  with  the 
details  of  the  narrative,  but  by  dividing  the  person  of  whom  it  speaks, 
according  to  his  historical  and  his  mythical  attributes.  This  is  the 
experiment  which  I  have  so  often  noticed.  It  may  be  applied  to  the 
Gospel  narratives ;  but  unless  it  will  solve  all  the  facts  relating  to 


416 


SIGNS  OF  A 


a  spiritual  and  universal  kingdom  which  we  have  been  considering 
it  is  worth  nothing.  Show  that  there  is  no  such  constitution  for 
mankind,  and  you  have  confuted  the  Gospels,  for  they  are  built 
upon  the  assumption  that  there  is.  But  if  there  be  such  a  king- 
dom, we  must  know  who  is  the  Head  and  Lord  of  it,  and  how  He 
has  established  it.  These  Gospels  have  given  that  knowledge  to 
men  for  many  centuries  ;  we  believe  that  they  have  yet  much 
more  to  communicate,  which  we  have  not  been  able  to  receive,  but 
which  the  events  of  this  time,  and  these  very  controversies,  will 
make  known  to  us.  Feeling  that  they  are  given  us,  and  that  they 
have  a  deep  reality  in  them,  we  cannot  be  unwilling  that  they 
should  be  submitted  to  any  scrutiny.  If  there  be  any  thing  in 
them  which  was  not  meant  to  be  in  them,  we  doubt  not  but  it  will 
be  brought  to  light,  and  that  He  who  brings  it  to  light  will 
make  his  own  truth  the  clearer  by  the  discovery.  But  that  they 
contain  that  which  no  other  books  in  the  world  contain,  which  no 
other  parts  of  the  Scripture  contain,  and  which  is  a  key  to  all  that 
is  written  elsewhere ;  this,  we  believe,  has  been  made  and  will  be 
made  only  the  more  evident,  by  the  questions  w7hich  have  been 
raised  in  these  and  former  days  respecting  them. 

THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 

I  have  contended,  then,  that  a  Bible  without  a  Church  is  in- 
conceivable, that  the  appointed  ministers  of  the  Church  aret  the 
appointed  instruments  for  guiding  men  into  a  knowledge  of  the 
Bible,  that  the  notion  of  private  judgment  is  a  false  notion,  that 
Inspiration  belongs  to  (he  Church,  and  not  merely  to  the  writers  of 
the  Bible,  that  the  miracles  of  the  New  Testament  were  the  intro- 
duction of  a  new  dispensation,  and  were  not  merely  a  set  of  strange 
acts  belonging  to  a  particular  time  ;  lastly,  that  the  Gospel  narra- 
tives must  be  received  as  parts  of  the  necessary  furniture  of  the 
Church.  Now  is  there  not  a  manifest  tendency  towards  Romanism 
in  these  positions  1  Do  they  not  one  and  all  belong  to  the  system 
which  I  have  denounced  ? 

Let  us  consider : 

1st.  I  have  supposed  the  Bible  and  the  Church  to  be  mutual  in- 
terpreters of  each  other.  The  Church  exists  as  a  fact,  the  Bible 
shows  what  that  fact  means.    The  Bible  is  a  fact,  the  Church 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


417 


shows  what  that  fact  means.  Now,  what  I  complain  of  in  Ro- 
manism, is  that  it  has  entirely  overlooked  the  relation  of  these  two 
parts  of  God's  scheme  to  each  other.  It  has  concealed  the  Bible 
from  men  on  purpose  that  the  Church  might  be  exalted.  And  it 
has  proved  that  the  Church  could  not  be  exalted  while  the  Bible 
was  hidden,  that  while  there  was  no  book  to  explain  to  the  whole 
body  of  the  Church  its  own  position,  that  position  of  necessity  be- 
came unintelligible.  Men  did  not  know  what  it  was  to  be  Church- 
men, because  they  could  not  learn  it  from  this  book,  and  because 
no  other  was  able  to  tell  them. 

2dly.  Hence  we  see,  wherein  my  notion  of  the  powers  of  min- 
isters differs  from  that  of  the  Romanist.  He  thinks  that  a  minister 
has  a  power  and  commission  to  hide  the  Bible  from  the  laity.  I 
think  he  has  a  power  and  commission  to  lay  it  open  to  the  laity.  I 
think  that  every  one  has  an  appointed  work  to  do ;  that  when  we 
refuse  our  own  appointed  work,  or  do  not  acknowledge  the  different 
appointment  of  another,  we  necessarily  miss  some  good  which  was 
intended  for  us.  And  therefore  I  do  not  think  that  the  laity,  rejecting 
the  teachings  of  their  appointed  ministers,  will  understand  the  Bible. 
And  I  do  not  think,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  minister,  putting 
himself  in  the  place  of  the  Bible,  and  not  encouraging  the  laity  to 
read  it  and  digest  it,  can  be  a  true  teacher,  can  exercise  the  powers 
wThich  God  has  committed  to  him. 

3d.  I  believe,  as  I  have  said,  that  the  Bible  and  the  Church 
were  intended  to  raise  men  out  of  their  private  judgments,  and  to 
guide  each  man  who  will  be  guided,  into  the  truth  which  is  meant 
for  all.  The  Romanist  claims  an  authority  for  the  Church  in  op- 
oposition  to  private  judgments.  But  it  is  not  an  authority  to  call 
forth  the  spirits  of  men — to  draw  them  out  of  the  little  narrow  cir- 
cle of  private  experiences  and  conclusions — but  an  authority  to 
crush  the  exercise  of  their  spirits,  to  hinder  them  from  obtaining 
freedom.  And  therefore  this  authority  has  itself  become  the  tool  of 
private  judgments.  Half  the  inventions  of  Romanism  are  the  in- 
ventions of  private  judgment — the  fruits  of  a  condescension  on  the 
part  of  the  priest  to  the  narrow-minded  feelings  and  judgments  of 
his  subjects,  or  else  the  creations  of  his  own  judgment,  both  alike 
manifesting  the  need  of  that  universal  law  and  standard  by  which 
both  ought  to  have  been  tried. 


418 


SIGNS  OF  A 


4th.  The  presence  of  that  Spirit  who  is  the  source  of  all  inspira- 
tion, in  the  whole  body  of  the  Church,  and  in  each  of  its  members 
that  he  may  fulfil  his  own  appointed  position  ;  this  is  involved  in 
the  idea  of  our  baptism ;  disbelieving  this,  we  acknowledge  no 
Church  at  all.  In  virtue  of  this  gift,  we  are  to  believe  that  every 
member  of  the  Church  has  a  capacity  for  understanding  the  high 
privileges  which  have  been  obtained  for  him  ;  in  virtue  of  this  gift, 
we  believe  that  the  ministers  of  the  Church  can  educate  their  flocks 
into  the  apprehension  of  them.  Our  complaint  against  the  Romish 
system  is,  that  it  does  not  allow  us  to  act  upon  the  faith  of  this  in- 
spiration. It  supposes  inspiration  to  be  communicated  to  certain 
persons  at  certain  periods,  for  the  sake  of  certain  startling  effects. 
It  supposes  an  inspiration  to  reside  somewhere  in  the  Church,  for 
the  purpose  of  determining  what  men  are  and  what  men  are  not  to 
hold,  for  the  purpose  of  keeping  down  questioning,  and  giving  a 
sense  to  Scripture.  But  an  abiding  Spirit,  one  who  will  guide  into 
all  truth,  and  can  tolerate  no  falsehood,  one  who  can  unfold  the 
Scriptures  to  different  a^es  according  to  their  different  wants,  such 
a  Spirit,  such  an  inspiration,  it  will  not  allow  us  to  recognise. 

5th.  And  therefore,  our  difference  on  the  subject  of  miracles  is 
also  very  intelligible.  If  you  recognise  miracles,  as  connected  with 
the  idea  of  a  spiritual  kingdom,  and  not  merely  belonging  to  a  cer- 
tain book,  why,  the  Romanist  asks,  will  you  not  recognise  the  mir- 
acles in  which  we  believe  ?  why  not  suppose  that  they  may  occur  in 
the  nineteenth  century  as  well  as  in  the  first  ?  I  answer,  I  neiiher 
affirm  nor  deny  any  thing  as  to  the  question  how  often  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  Church,  or  in  what  periods  of  it  God  may  have  been 
pleased  to  suspend  the  operations  of  intermediate  agents,  for  the 
purpose  of  showing  that  He  is  at  all  times  the  Author  and  Mover  of 
them.  This  question  must  be  determined  by  a  careful  study  of  his- 
torical evidence;  upon  the  result  of  such  a  study  I  should  be  very 
sorry  to  dogmatize.  Those  who  believe  that  miracles  are  for  the 
assertion  of  order,  and  not  for  the  violation  of  it,  for  the  sake  of 
proving  the  constant  presence  of  a  spiritual  power,  and  not  for  the 
sake  of  showing  that  it  interferes  occasionally  with  the  affairs  of  the 
world,  will  be  the  least  inclined  to  expect  the  frequent  repetitions 
of  such  signs,  for  they  hold,  that  being  recorded  as  facts  in  the  for- 
mer ages  of  the  world,  they  become  laws  in  ours,  that  we  are  to 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


419 


own  Him  who  healed  the  sick  of  the  palsy,  in  every  cure  which  is 
wrought  by  the  ordinary  physician,  Him  who  stilled  the  storm  on 
the  Lake  of  Gennesareth,  in  the  guidance  and  preservation  of  every 
ship  which  crosses  the  ocean — and  that  this  effect  would  be  lost, 
if  we  were  led  to  put  any  contempt  upon  that  which  is  daily  and 
habitual.  Still,  I  should  think  it  very  presumptuous  to  say,  that  it 
has  never  been  needful,  in  the  modern  history  of  the  world,  to  break 
the  idols  of  sense  and  experience  by  the  same  method  which  was  sanc- 
tioned in  the  days  of  old.  Far  less  should  I  be  inclined  to  underrate  the 
piety,  and  criticise  the  wisdom  or  honesty  of  those  men,  who,  missing 
or  overlooking  intermediate  powers,  of  which  they  knew  little,  at  once 
referred  the  acts  and  events  they  witnessed  to  their  primary  source. 

But  these  admissions  only  compel  me  the  more  solemnly  to  re- 
ject at  least  nineteen  twentieths  of  all  the  miracles  recorded  in  Ro- 
manist books  in  later  times.  In  reference  to  these,  we  are  not 
bound  to  go  into  a  careful  collation  of  evidences.  In  general  there 
is  very  little  to  collate,  but  where  there  is  apparently  the  best  and 
most  respectable,  there  is  a  grand  preliminary  objection.  I  dare 
not  believe  such  miracles  as  these,  because  I  believe  the  miracles  of  the 
New  Testament.  I  am  expressly  told  in  Scripture  that  there  are  mira- 
cles which  I  am  not  to  believe,  which  are  to  produce  no  impression  upon 
me  whatever.  I  do  not  want  to  go  into  the  question  of  the  honesty  or 
the  dishonesty  of  persons  who  report  them,  that  is  a  question  between 
their  own  consciences  and  their  Creator,  they  best  know  whether  they 
are  or  are  not  lying  for  God.  But  it  is  the  character  of  the  miracle 
which  determines  my  judgment  of  it.  Is  it  to  lead  me  into  the  wTorship 
of  the  Visible  or  the  Invisible  ?  Is  it  to  deliver  me  from  sensible 
things,  or  to  make  me  a  slave  of  sensible  things  1 

Does  the  Romanist  advocate  say  that  I  have  no  right  to  ask 
these  questions  ?  I  know  he  says  so — and  I  will  tell  him  why  he 
says  so.  He  says  so  because  there  is  a  secret  root  of  unbelief  in  his 
mind,  a  secret  doubt  whether  any  thing  wtrue,  which  finds  refuge  in 
the  thought  that  every  thing  may  be  true.  This  is  a  very  prevailing 
tendency  in  our  day  ;  it  is  the  natural  reaction  against  the  skepticism 
of  the  last  century.  A  number  of  men  in  France  and  Germany, 
and  perhaps  quite  as  many  in  England  as  in  either,  have  passed  or 
are  passing,  not  through  any  gradual  stages,  but  per  solium,  from 
universal  doubt  to  universal  credence.    And  they  are  able  to  carry 

4 


420 


SIGNS  OF  A 


the  same  habits  of  mind  into  both  professions ;  they  are  able  to  say 
to  themselves  with  great  complacency,  and  with  no  little  truth,  *  we 
are  not  really  changed,  we  do  not  acknowledge  any  standard  now 
more  than  before ;  the  only  difference  is,  that  we  have  substituted 
the  new7  pourquoi  non  for  the  old  pourquoi.'  It  does  not  the  least 
surprise  us  to  hear  such  men,  who  twenty  years  ago  would  have 
laughed  us  to  scorn  for  believing  in  the  resurrection  of  Lazarus, 
now  indulging  in  fierce  denunciations  of  all  who  doubt  the  miracles 
in  the  Tyrol.  The  logic, £  where  are  you  to  stop  short  V  was  that 
which  they  used  in  their  contemptuous  manhood,  and  which  still 
seems  to  them  perfectly  conclusive,  in  their  not  less  contemptuous, 
nor  less  really  skeptical  old  age.  We  can  only  repeat,  we  stop 
short  when  we  find  ourselves  arrived  at  the  exact  contradiction  of 
that  which  we  have  believed.  We  have  received  our  Lord  as  the 
Great  Deliverer,  who  has  led  captive  our  captivity  to  sense ;  we 
stop  short  when  we  meet  with  persons  who  would  bring  us  into 
that  captivity  again. 

The  Bible,  we  believe,  is  meant  to  cultivate  in  us  a  habit  of 
distinguishing ;  faithfully  and  humbly  used,  it  has  that  effect.  If 
you,  who  have  not  used  it  or  believed  in  it,  show  that  you  have 
not  acquired  that  habit,  we  have  only  another  reason  for  giving 
thanks,  that  God  has  been  pleased  not  to  hide  the  blessing  from 
us  or  from  our  children. 

6th.  These  last  considerations  apply  very  remarkably  to  the 
case  of  the  Gospel  narratives.  It  is  said,  "  the  Church  has  pre- 
served to  us  these  histories  of  our  Lord's  life ;  you  receive  them 
upon  the  authority  of  the  Church.  You  know  very  little  about  the 
persons  who  wrote  them,  you  accept  them  because  they  are  given 
to  you  as  parts  of  the  canon.  Well,  but  the  Church  has  put  its 
sanction  upon  many  histories  of  the  saints ;  she  deems  them  also 
profitable  for  her  children.  Granted  that  they  refer  to  inferior 
persons,  that  they  never  can  be  as  important  as  the  Gospels,  yet 
where  do  you  draw  the  line?  You  have  admitted  Church  autho- 
rity in  one  case,  the  highest  case  of  all,  why  not  admit  it  also  in 
a  lower  case  ?"  I  answer,  by  the  care  of  God's  providence 
through  his  Church,  these  records  of  its  Lord  and  Head  have  been 
preserved.  They  have  been  preserved,  no  doubt,  for  many 
great  and  solemn  purposes,  but  for  this  especially,  that  there  may 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


421 


be  a  standard  in  the  world,  by  which  all  other  acts  and  lives 
may  be  tried.  Exclude  the  Gospels  from  our  canon,  let  there  be 
nothing  there  but  epistles  setting  forth  spiritual  principles,  and  not 
only  do  those  principles  lose  their  meaning  for  want  of  a  true  per- 
sonal object  to  which  they  may  refer ;  but  this  end  is  wholly  lost — 
there  is  no  character  set  before  men,  which  exhibits  to  them 
the  image  after  which  they  were  formed,  in  connexion  with 
the  life  of  this  earth.  Now  if  the  Church  have  preserved 
for  me  these  books,  and  have  told  me  the  object  for  which 
they  were  preserved,  I  am  not  obeying  her  when  I  lose  sight 
of  this  object ;  I  am  not  obeying  her  when  I  am  not  bringing 
all  other  books  and  lives  to  this  standard.  I  am  not,  indeed,  to  do 
this  for  the  sake  of  condemning  them,  not  for  the  sake  of  seeing 
what  is  wrong  in  them — I  have  no  commission  or  powers  for  that 
purpose — but  certainly  for  the  sake  of  seeing  how  far  I  may  safely 
follow  them.  If,  then,  I  find  records  of  different  men,  all  professedly 
acknowledging  this  type  or  image  as  the  one  to  which  they  should 
be  conformed,  I  am  bound  thankfully  to  admire  every  feature  of 
their  lives,  which  has  been  caught  by  reflection  from  it.  I  may 
very  often  go  wrong  in  my  judgment  of  these  features;  I  may  mis- 
take a  bad  copy  for  a  good  one,  or  disown  a  true  one  because  I 
have  not  sufficient  spiritual  cultivation  to  understand  the  circum- 
stances of  its  form  and  colouring.  Still,  the  more  I  study  the  ori- 
ginal under  such  guidance  as  is  given  to  me,  the  more  I  must  be- 
lieve and  hope  that  the  faculty  will  be  cultivated  in  me,  whereby  I 
may  discern  the  true  from  the  counterfeit.  And  I  must  look  to  the 
Church  to  help  me  in  this  work,  to  be  continually  teaching  me  how 
to  observe  the  traces  of  the  divine  model  in  the  human  imitation, 
how  to  see  what  in  it  was  produced  merely  by  the  accidents  of  the 
time,  or  by  human  self-will  and  frailness. 

Such  help  I  believe  the  Church,  holding  the  Bible  in  her  hand, 
is  able  to  furnish  to  her  faithful  disciples;  and  my  charge  against 
the  Romish  system  is,  that  it  has  hindered  the  Church  from  exercis- 
ing this  prerogative,  and  forced  her  to  exercise  a  most  different 
one.  What  I  mean  will  be  best  understood  by  the  use  which  has 
been  made  in  this  system  of  the  word  ■  Saint.' 

The  Gospels  teach  me,  the  Church  in  all  ages  teaches  me,  to 
acknowledge  our  Lord  as  one  who  perfectly  identified  himself  with 


422 


SIGNS  OF  A 


humanity,  with  all  its  sorrows  and  sufferings,  yea,  with  its  sins ; 
because  He  was  without  sin,  He  was  able  to  bear  the  sins  of  all 
men.  This  character  of  essential  humanity,  is  so  much  the  charac- 
ter which  we  feel  to  belong  to  our  Lord,  so  much  the  character 
which  did  manifest,  and  which  alone  could  manifest  his  divinity, 
that  it  may  be  said  to  be  the  grand  object  of  the  Church,  in 
her  Advents,  her  Epiphanies,  her  Lents,  her  Passion  Weeks,  her 
Easter-Days,  her  Ascension-Days,  to  exhibit  it.  And  it  has 
been  the  feeling  of  every  true  saint  in  the  world's  history, 
that  this  was  the  character  which  our  Lord  would  especially 
seek  to  produce  in  his  disciples.  A  largeness  of  heart,  a  sympathy 
with  all  our  race,  a  fellowship  in  its  sufferings,  grief  for  the  sins 
which  hold  it  down,  these  assuredly  are  qualities  which  the  most 
conspicuous  saints  of  the  Romish  calendar  acknowledge  as  most 
high  and  divine.  Along  with  these  are  associated  humiliation,  suf- 
fering, indifference  to  good  or  evil  report.  Bnt  now  comes  in  the 
counterfeit  system ;  4  What  a  great  and  glorious  thing  it  is  to  be 
a  saint,  to  he  above  the  rest  of  men,  to  be  unlike  them  !  What  a 
fine  thing  it  is  to  be  humble,  self-denying,  submitting  to  persecu- 
tion and  shame  !  What  glory  do  those  get  who  can  eclipse  one 
another  in  this  race  !  What  an  honour  it  is  to  be  enrolled  in  this 
calendar;  what  fame  w-e  get  here,  what  rewards  in  the  life  to  come  !' 
Who  does  not  feel  instinctively  that  we  have  here  introduced  a 
new  image,  the  very  opposite  to  that  we  were  just  considering  ?  It 
has  come  in  one  knows  not  how,  under  the  very  names  and  words 
which  seemed  so  sacred  and  beautiful ;  but  see  how  frightful  and 
deformed  it  is !  Yet  will  any  one  dare  to  say  there  has  not  been 
a  system,  that  there  is  not  a  system  now,  which  sanctions  this 
image,  puts  honour  upon  it,  holds  it  up  to  imitation  and  idolatry? 

We  are  not  bound  to  say  of  any  particular  person,  He  has  given 
himself  up  to  this  system,  he  has  caught  this  image.  We  may  be- 
lieve, and  rejoice  to  believe,  that  there  have  been  multitudes  in  every 
age  of  the  Church,  that  there  are  numbers  in  every  country  of  Eu- 
rope at  this  day,  who,  be  their  outward  professions  and  symbols  what 
they  may,  do  in  their  hearts  confess  the  true  image,  do  in  their  lives 
conform  to  it.  Such  persons  belong  to  the  Catholic  Church,  they  are 
witnesses  of  her  permanence,  and  that  she  will  one  day  come  out 
bright  and  beautiful  from  all  her  corruptions,  as  a  bride  adorned  for 


SPIRITUAL  SOCIETY. 


423 


her  husband.  But  the  existence  of  such  persons  only  makes  us  see 
more  clearly  and  hate  more  fervently  the  system  which  has  assum- 
ed the  name  and  affected  the  powers  of  the  Church  ;  only  makes 
us  believe  more  surely,  that  it  will  be  destroyed  by  the  brightness 
of  His  coming,  who  is  the  true  and  only  Pope  and  Potentate,  the 
real  King  of  Saints. 


CHAPTER  V. 

ON  THE  RELATIONS   OF  THE  CHURCH  WITH  NATIONAL  BODIES. 


SECTION  I. 

The  Old  Testament.— Ancient  Pagan  History. — History  of  Modern  Europe. — General 

Inferences. 

The  question»how  the  Old  Testament  dispensation  is  related  to 
the  New,  has  already  come  before  us  in  several  forms.  Bi;t  hitherto 
we  have  considered  it  only  in  reference  to  those  signs  which  all 
Christians  believe  to  have  passed  away — the  Quaker  merging  them 
in  certain  spiritual  ideas,  we  supposing  to  have  been  exchanged  for 
other  signs  betokening  higher  truths.  When  we  speak  of  that 
which  is  commonly  called  the  moral  side  of  the  Jewish  economy, 
the  controversy  assumes  another  shape.  One  set  of  Christians 
strongly  affirm,  that  the  precepts  of  this  kind  in  the  old  Law  ai  I 
of  permanent  obligation  and  validity  ;  others  say  that  they  have  no 
authority  except  so  far  as  they  are  re-enacted  by,  or  involved  in  the 
Gospel  law  of  love. 

The  holders  of  the  first  opinion  in  general  confine  their  asser- 
tions to  the  ten  commandments.  They  do  not  positively  affirm  that 
the  sacredness  of  the  Divine  Code  may  not  extend  to  certain  parts 
of  the  Jewish  institutions — that  point  they  are  content  to  leave 
open — but  these  commandments  stand  out  in  clear  and  awful  dis- 
tinctness ;  they  were  proclaimed  amidst  thunders  and  lightnings ; 
the  Jews  looked  upon  them  as  written  with  the  finger  of  God ;  the 
sense  of  mankind  has  received  them  as  divine.  On  the  other  hand, 
their  opponents  see  no  reason  for  separating  these  commandments 
from  the  rest  of  the  ritual,  either  for  honor  or  dishonor.  '  The  his- 
torian declares  that  both  proceeded  from  the  Lord  ;  it  is  not  on  the 
ground  of  a  difference  in  their  authority,  then,  that  you  can  distin- 
guish them.  Neither  can  you  distinguish  them  by  their  character. 
The  Sabbath  is  as  much  a  positive  institution  as  the  cities  of  refuge; 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


425 


if  you  admit  the  distinction  between  that  which  is  moral  and  that 
which  is  positive,  you  must  acknowledge  both  to  be  transitory;  if 
you  reject  that  distinction,  neiiher.' 

It  was  impossible  to  consider  this  subject  in  the  last  section ; 
yet,  perhaps,  some  hints  which  were  given  there  may  assist  us  now. 
I  have  maintained  that  the  Scriptures  interpret  to  us  signs  which 
we  discover  actually  existing  amongst  us,  and  which  require  an  in- 
terpreter. The  New  Testament  has  explained  to  us  the  signs  of 
Baptism,  The  Creeds,  Forms  of  Worship,  The  Eucharist,  The  Or- 
ders of  Ministry,  as  these  exist  in  modern  Europe.  It  has  explained 
them  to  be  signs  of  a  spiritual  and  universal  society.  It  has  shown 
us  what  such  a  society  means ;  what  place  each'  of  these  signs  holds 
in  it.  Supposing  these  signs  to  have  perished,  supposing  there  to 
be  no  longer  a  dream  of  such  a  society,  the  Scripture  would  be  a 
very  puzzling  book;  while  they  last  it  is  an  indispensable  one  to 
those  who  would  understand  their  own  position.  The  early  parts 
of  it  were  necessary  in  this  point  of  view,  because  they  discovered 
part  of  the  meaning  which  each  sign  embodies,  enabling  us  gradu- 
ally to  attain  to  a  perception  of  its  full  import,  and  to  look  upon  it 
as  connected  with  the  life  of  man.  When,  therefore,  we  meet  in 
these  early  records  with  customs,  institutions,  ordinances  which  God 
has  not  been  pleased  to  preserve  to  us,  we  presume  that  they  are  to 
be  contemplated  historically  by  the  light  of  that  which  He  has  pre- 
served to  us.  Or,  if  there  be  a  question  whether,  perhaps,  they 
might  not  be  advantageously  restored,  we  are  in  a  condition  to  ex- 
amine this  point  by  the  light  which  Scripture  gives  us  respecting 
the  whole  dispensation.  But  supposing  we  find  any  signs  which, 
amidst  all  changes  of  circumstances,  have  maintained  their  existence 
and  have  become  identified  with  the  life  of  modern  society,  we  must 
desire  an  explanation  of  them,  and  must  seek  for  it  where  it  is  to 
be  had.  If  we  belong  to  a  different  period  of  the  world  from  that 
in  which  we  first  find  these  traces,  it  may  be  very  important  to  know 
how  the  change  has  affected  them,  whether  they  exist  under  the 
same  conditions  now  as  heretofore;  but  the  fact  that  they  do  exist 
is  the  first  of  all ;  this  compels  us  to  ask,  whence  they  are  derived, 
and  on  what  ground  they  rest  ? 

Now  any  one  who  considers  these  ten  commandments,  must 
perceive  that  they  are  definitive  and  conservative,  not  creative  or 


426 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


constitutive.  They  presume  the  existence  of  certain  facts,  princi- 
ples, and  institutions,  and  it  is  the  violation  or  forgetful ness  of  these 
which  they  denounce.  The  first  presumes  that  the  Jews  had  been 
brought  out  of  Egypt  by  an  unseen  Being.  He  is  their  deliverer 
and  Lord ;  as  such  they  are  to  acknowledge  Him.  The  second 
presumes  the  existence  of  Worship,  a  tendency  in  men  to  create 
the  objects  of  it  for  themselves  out  of  the  things  which  they  see  and 
handle;  a  relation  between  the  worshippers  and  the  Invisible 
Lord;  a  government  exercised  by  Him  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion. The  third  presumes  the  practice  of  appealing  to  the  Name 
of  God,  of  invoking  Him  as  one  who  knows  whether  a  man  be 
guilty  or  innocent.  The  fourth  assumes  the  institution  of  the 
Week;  explains  whereof  it  is  the  sign;  gives  warning  against 
the  forgetfulness  of  the  distinction  between  the  six  days  and  the 
seventh  day.  The  fifth  presumes  the  existence  of  the  Paternal 
Relation,  and  treats  the  respect  for  it  as  the  condition  of  abiding  in 
the  land  given  to  the  nation.  The  sixth  presumes  the  existence  of 
a  community  which  is  interested  in  the  Life  of  each  of  its  members. 
The  seventh  presumes  the  institution  of  Marriage.  The  eighth 
presumes  the  institution  of  Property.  The  ninth  presumes  the  ex- 
istence of  Tribunals,  before  which  one  may  give  witness  respecting 
another.  The  tenth  affirms  the  existence  of  a  bond  of  Neighbor- 
hood— the  same  bond  which  is  supposed  in  all  the  rest — and  de- 
clares that  even  the  coveting  of  that  which  is  a  neighbour's  is  a 
violation  of  it. 

That  these  facts,  institutions  and  principles,  had  a  very  close 
connexion  with  the  life  and  being  of  that  nation  which  was 
brought  out  of  Egypt,  most  readers  will  acknowledge  :  but  if  they 
turn  to  ancient  history,  they  find  that  some  of  them  had  a  very  close 
connexion  with  the  being  and  life  of  every  nation  wThich  it  speaks 
of.  The  Greeks  and  Romans  were  remarkably  distinguished  from 
each  other.  But  they  were  both  alike  distinguished  from  the  slaves 
and  barbarians,  of  whose  existence  we  become  aware  chiefly 
through  them.  Wherein  lay  the  difference  ?  Apart  from  all  in- 
tellectual superiority,  (though  it  is  hardly  right  to  say,  apart,  the 
one  characteristic  was  so  involved  in  the  other,)  it  is  quite  evident 
that  they  had  a  clear  sense  of  certain  great  landmarks  and  bounda- 
ries in  human  society,  the  violation  of  which  was  an  evil ;  that 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


427 


they  believed  these  landmarks  to  have  been  fixed  by  an  awful  unseen 
power,  and  to  be  preserved  by  that  power :  that  among  the  chief 
of  these  landmarks  they  reckoned  the  sacredness  of  life,  of  the 
paternal  relation,  of  marriage,  of  property,  of  appeals  to  the  Divine 
name,  of  tribunals  for  rectifying  wrong ;  the  law  of  neighbourhood 
as  binding  those  who  acknowledged  a  common  ancestry,  and  were 
living  in  the  same  locality;  the  majesty  of  law  as  preserved  by 
the  majesty  of  worship. 

But  two  of  the  Commandments  have  no  counterparts  in  the 
legislation  of  Greece  or  Rome.  There  was,  I  have  said,  a  distinct 
recognition  of  an  unseen  Majesty  from  which  it  proceeded,  and  by 
which  it  was  upheld  ;  there  was  not  the  prohibition  of  confounding 
the  unseen  Majesty  with  things  visible.  There  was  the  recognition 
of  different  sacred  seasons  connected  with  the  course  of  the  sun 
and  moon.  There  was  not  the  recognition  of  a  Week  ;  a  division 
of  time  depending  upon  some  other  law  than  the  astronomical; 
defining  human  life,  by  its  two  great  principles  of  action  and  rest ; 
connecting  these  two  principles  with  the  life  and  being  of  God  ; 
teaching  that  his  rest  and  action  are  the  patterns  of  ours,  and  yet 
that  He  is  ever  at  rest  while  we  are  working,  and  ever  at  work  on 
our  behalf  while  we  are  resting;  incorporating  the  Divine  with 
the  common,  and  yet  hallowing  the  distinction  between  them;  sig- 
nifying that  the  palace  and  the  hut,  nay,  the  master  and  his  cattle, 
are  subject  to  the  same  government;  making  each  nightly  slumber 
the  image  of  the  final  repose  of  the  spirit  and  soul  and  body,  each 
in  its  proper  and  appointed  object.  Let  any  one  consider  how  the 
political  life  of  these  nations  was  affected  by  the  sensual  tendencies 
of  their  worship  ;  let  him  meditate  upon  the  difficulty  which  every 
philosopher  experienced  in  his  endeavour  to  reconcile  the  idea  of  a 
living,  acting  God,  with  one  continually  resting  in  his  own  beati- 
tude, the  still  greater  difficulty  of  finding  any  point  of  sympathy 
between  his  own  thoughts  and  those  of  common  men  who  felt  that 
the  God  they  feared  must  interfere  in  all  their  transactions,  and 
then  let  him  say  whether  the  second  or  the  fourth  Commandments 
do  not  receive  as  much  illustration  and  confirmation  from  the  human 
feeling  and  con  cience  of  the  old  world  as  the  sixth  or  the  seventh. 

Be  that  as  it  may,  not  only  some  of  these  institutions  but  all  of 
them  exist  among  ourselves.    The  Jewish  order  of  time,  so  far  as 


428 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


the  week  is  concerned,  has  become  as  much  a  part  of  the  institu- 
tions of  modern  Europe  as  marriage  or  property.  All  three  may 
be  regarded  indifferent  places  with  more  or  less  of  reverence;  but 
they  are  recognised  by  every  nation  of  Christendom,  and  incorpo- 
rated with  their  daily  transactions. 

But  on  what  authority  do  these  institutions  rest  ?  Here  begins 
another  difference  of  opinion.  The  ordinary  statesman  answers, 
'They  are  national  provisions,  of  more  or  less  importance,  deriving 
their  sanction  from  the  legislation  of  each  particular  national  so- 
ciety, invested  with  a  factitious  and  useful  sacredness  in  the  eyes  of 
the  vulgar  by  the  tradition  that  they  had  a  mysterious  origin.* 
The  ordinary  religious  man  answers,  '  They  have  nothing  to  do 
with  the  mere  political  or  national  life  of  any  society ;  they  are 
religious  ordinances,  appointed  by  God  himself,  binding  upon  all 
because  He  has  appointed  them.'  With  the  first  I  agree  so  far  as 
this,  that  I  do  look  upon  these  institutions  as  belonging  especially 
and  emphatically  to  particular  nations  as  such,  to  England  as  Eng- 
land, to  France  as  France,  to  Germany  as  Germany.  I  do  not 
look  upon  them  as  universal  institutions  in  the  sense  in  which  I 
have  called  Baptism  and  the  Eucharist  universal  institutions;  that 
is  to  say,  as  institutions  which  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  relations 
of  space  and  time.  And  if  the  religious  man  objects  to  this  dis- 
tinction,! tell  him  that  I  must  make  it  because  the  Scripture  makes 
it.  'I  am  the  Lord  thy  God' — this  is  the  sanction  of  the  code; 
clearly  a  distinct  national  sanction.  But  I  differ  with  the  statesman 
in  this  point.  I  do  not  think  national  society  is  a  lie  or  stands  upon 
a  lie.  If  I  did  I  should  wish  it  to  perish,  and  I  should  be  sure  it 
must  perish.  Now  unfortunately  he  does  think  this,  for  he  knows 
that  he  cannot  maintain  any  of  those  institutions  which  he  believes 
to  be  necessary  for  his  nation,  and  for  every  nation,  merely  by  his 
own  rules  and  conventions.  He  is  obliged  to  ask  help  from  the 
faith  which  men  everywhere  have  had  that  there  is  a  Divine  ruler, 
not  only  over  men  generally,  but  over  their  particular  common- 
wealth:  and  this  faith,  he  says,  is  a  mere  delusion.  I  believe  that 
the  imposition  and  dishonesty  are  in  himself;  that  the  conviction  of 
mankind  is  a  safe  and  an  honest  one;  and  that  it  will  at  last  pre- 
vail against  all  the  frauds  which  have  endeavoured  to  support  it, 
and  have  really  made  it  weak. 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION.  429 

In  my  conclusion,  then,  I  agree  with  those  who  take  the  com- 
mon religious  view  of  this  matter.  But  the  difference  in  our  pre- 
mises is  not  a  slight  one,  or  one  without  the  most  practical  conse- 
quences. I  have  partly  explained  wherein  it  consists,  but  I  must 
endeavour  to  make  my  meaning  more  clear.  We  are  first  told  that 
we  must  not  look  upon  these  commandments  merely  as  parts  of  a 
national  institute.  And  yet  they  evidently  are  parts  of  a  national 
institute.  We  are  told  that  we  must  not  receive  them  merely  as  of 
outward  or  formal  obligation,  for  they  contain  the  essence  of  moral- 
ity. But  they  do  seem  to  have  a  particular  outward  and  formal 
character.  They  refer,  not  one  but  all, to  formal  institutions;  only 
the  last  even  touches  upon  any  internal  habit  of  mind,  and  the  ex- 
ceeding definiteness  of  that  one, '  Thou  shalt  not  covet  thy  neigh- 
bour's wife,  nor  his  man-servant,  nor  his  maid-servant,  nor  his  ox, 
nor  his  ass/  shows  that  the  habit  is  noticed  for  the  sake  of  the  act, 
not  the  act  for  the  sake  of  the  habit.  So  far  from  wishing  to  over- 
look this  characteristic,  I  am  most  anxious  to  notice  it  and  dwell 
upon  it ;  for  herein  I  believe  consists  the  exceeding  importance  of 
these  commandments,  and  the  proof  that  they  are  not  superseded 
by  the  new  dispensation.  They  set  the  divine  seal  upon  that  which 
belongs  to  man  as  a  creature  of  flesh  and  blood,  inhabiting  a  par- 
ticular place,  having  a  definite  circle  of  human  relations  and  earth- 
ly associations;  they  declare  these  to  be  settled  according  to  a 
divine  order,  and  to  be  taken  under  a  divine  cognizance  ;  they 
bring  acts,  outwTard  ordinary  acts,  into  judgment. 

By  adopting  this  view,  we  seem  to  escape  from  some  serious 
confusions.  We  are  able  to  enter  into  the  peculiar  character  of' 
the  Jewish  nation,  without  losing  our  sense  of  its  connexion  with 
all  mankind.  We  are  able,  by  help  of  it,  to  connect  our  own  lives 
with  the  lives  of  those  people  in  the  old  world,  of  whom  we  read, 
and  with  whom  we  feel  that  we  have  such  close  sympathies,  in 
spite  of  all  differences  of  race,  of  language,  of  religious  faith  and 
knowledge.  Above  all,  we  are  able  to  rid  ourselves  of  the  Mani- 
chean  notion,  (which  it  should  be  remembered  has  been  always 
connected  with  a  low  notion  of  the  Old  Testament,)  that  the  out- 
ward and  visible  universe,  and  the  ordinary  social  relations,  are  the 
creations  of  an  evil  spirit,  to  be  esteemed  lightly  of  by  all  who 
have  attained  to  the  perception  of  a  higher  economy.  That  this  last 

28 


430 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


accursed  doctrine,  which  cleaves  most  closely  to  the  hearts  of  us 
all,  and  perhaps  was  never  more  threatening  than  at  this  day,  will 
ever  be  fully  exposed  and  scouted  till  we  acknowledge  the  sanctity, 
the  grandeur,  the  divinity  of  national  life,  I  do  not  think  that  the 
history  of  mankind  offers  us  the  least  excuse  for  believing.  But, 
then,  if  we  admit  these  positions,  and  have  arrived  at  them  by  this 
method,  other  questions  will  necessarily  force  themselves  upon  us. 
We  have  seen  that  the  objectors  to  the  authority  of  the  Ten  Com- 
mandments found  their  most  plausible  argument  upon  the  difficulty  of 
separating  them  from  the  surrounding  history.  It  has  seemed  to  us 
that  this  difficulty  is  a  very  light  one  when  we  meet  with  records 
of  that  to  which  we  have  nothing  answering  among  ourselves.  As- 
sume the  fact  of  a  nation,  assume  the  Jews  to  be  the  specimen  of  a 
nation,  and  you  assume,  as  a  matter  of  course,  the  necessity  of  hun- 
dreds of  regulations  applicable  to  their  condition,  and  therefore  not 
applicable  to  ours.  But  if  principles  of  national  life  have  discover- 
ed themselves  to  us  in  the  midst  of  these  regulations,  we  must  ex- 
pect to  find  the  history  illustrating  these  principles,  and  thereby 
furnishing  the  key  to  facts  which  directly  concern  our  own  conduct. 
And  this  proves  to  be  the  case.  We  find  it  a  part,  not  an  accidental 
but  an  essential  part  of  the  idea,  of  a  Jewish  commonwealth,  that 
Punishments  should  be  inflicted  upon  transgressors,  that  in  certain 
cases  their  Lives  should  be  taken  away.  The  judicial  Oath  again 
belongs  to  the  religion  of  the  Jewish  state  ;  every  Jew  would  have 
understood  the  third  commandment  in  reference  to  it.  Still  more 
obviously  was  the  Jew  instructed  to  look  upon  War,  in  certain 
cases,  not  as  a  permitted  license  but  as  a  sole  mn  duty,  to  be  under- 
taken in  the  full  confidence  that  it  was  God's  will  he  should  en- 
gage in  it,  and  that  he  should  have  God's  help  in  carrying  it 
through.  Now  these  feelings  and  convictions  belonged  in  like 
manner  to  every  great  nation  of  antiquity  ;  belonged  to  them  as  na- 
tions, formed  part  of  their  religion,  were  the  means  of  exhibiting 
those  qualities  in  them  which  we  are  most  compelled  to  admire. 
Courage,  self-discipline,  order,  faith,  all  these  moral  attributes  were 
connected  in  them  with  the  conviction,  that  national  life  is  a  more 
precious  thing  than  individual  life,  and  that  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  individuals  are  cheaply  sacrificed,  for  the  sake  of  preserving  it. 
If  it  be  said  that  these  moral  qualities  were  mixed  with  others  of 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


431 


the  most  opposite  character,  and  that  these  two  found  their  grati- 
fication in  wars  and  in  judicial  severity,  no  man  in  his  senses  will 
dispute  the  assertion.  What  I  contend  for  is,  that  they  were  op- 
posite qualities,  however  they  might  be  intermingled  ;  and  that 
therefore,  if  we  hate  the  one  we  must  love  the  other,  or  else  all 
moral  distinction  will  become  effaced  in  our  mind<.  And  what  I 
say  further  is,  that  if  we  attach  any  sacredness  to  the  Jewish  his- 
tory, as  containing  the  divine  specimen  of  a  national  life,  we  can- 
not refuse  to  believe  that  the  other  nations  of  antiquity  were  justi- 
fied in  their  deep  inward  conviction,  that  God  has  not  given  swords 
to  men  in  vain,  but  that  there  are  occasions  on  which  the  magis- 
trate is  bound,  by  his  allegiance  to  God,  to  cut  off  the  offender 
against  the  majesty  of  the  law  ;  in  which  the  ruler  of  the  land 
must  invite  and  command  his  subjects  to  chastise  the  removers  of 
landmarks,  the  corrupters  of  the  earth,  and  the  oppressors  of  mankind. 

But  even  this  discovery  would  not  give  us  more  than  an  histo- 
rical interest  in  this  part  of  the  Jewish  records.  They  are  brought 
directly  home  to  ourselves  by  the  fact  that  every  nation  of  Chris- 
tendom resorts  to  judicial  Oaths,  imposes  Punishments,  in  some  cases 
capital,  and  believes  War,  under  certain  circumstances,  to  be  a 
duty.  The  question,  then,  becomes  a  very  important  one  ;  Is  this 
meant  to  be  so  or  not  1  Is  this  Old  Testament,  this  book  which 
we  have  found  to  be  a  key  to  the  main  problems  of  our  national 
life,  a  justification  of  these  convictions  ?  It  is  in  vain  to  say  that 
Jewish  precedent  will  only  justify  oaths  administered,  punishments 
fixed,  or  wars  undertaken  under  the  express  command  of  God.  I 
have  maintained  that  every  nation  ought  to  look  upon  itself  as  hav- 
ing the  Lord  for  its  King ;  that  if  we  do  not  recognise  that  princi- 
ple, the  commandments  mean  nothing  to  us,  the  institutions  of 
which  the  commandments  speak  have  no  authority  but  that 
which  they  derive  from  human  convention.  According  to  this 
doctrine,  the  question  what  acts  a  nation  ought  to  perform, 
and  what  it  ought  to  omit,  means,  in  other  words,  what  acts  are 
in  conformity  with  the  purpose  for  which  God  has  appointed 
it,  and  what  are  not.  These  acts  need  not  to  be  the  same 
as  those  which  the  Jews  performed,  because  each  nation  has  a  pur- 
pose to  fulfil  different  from  that  which  the  Jews  were  to  fulfil.  But 
these  convictions  which  I  speak  of  are  common  to  all  nations  as 


432 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


nations.    They  have  been  guiding  maxims  assumed  in  the  examin- 
ation of  particular  cases.    The  conscience  of  men  has  said,  Because 
oaths,  punishments,  and  wars  are  in  themselves  authorized  by  God, 
and  can  be  only  justifiable  in  those  cases  and  under  the  conditions 
which  he  approves,  therefore  we  ought  to  consider  earnestly  what 
these  cases  and  conditions  are.    The  question  is,  whether  this  pri- 
mary assumption  is  or  is  not  warranted  by  the  book  which  sets 
forth  to  us  the  divine  principles  of  national  society.    It  is  idle  to 
say,  But  where  do  you  find  the  authority  for  wars,  oaths,  or  punish- 
ments in  the  New  Testament  ?    I  do  not  find  the  authority 
for  any  of  the  distinct  institutes  of  national   life  in    he  New 
Testament.    The  Manichseans  and  Anabaptists  were  quite  right, 
when  they  said  that  there  was  no  distinct  precept  respecting  prop- 
erty in  the  New  Testament ;  that  the  first  sign  of  the  existence  of 
a  Church  was  that  of  men  not  calling  their  goods  their  own,  but 
counting  all  things  common.    Nor  was  there  any  thing  unnatural 
in  their  feeling,  that  since  in  the  resurrection  men  neither  marry 
nor  are  given  in  marriage,  the  kingdom  of  Christ,  which  is  the 
kingdom  of  the  risen  life,  must  look  with  some  contempt  on  the 
union  of  the  sexes.    Nor  was  it  a  surprising  inference,  from  the 
continual  allusions  in  the  Gospels  to  our  Lord's  controversies  writh 
the  Pharisees  respecting  the  Sabbath  day,  that  under  the  new 
economy,  the  distinction  of  days  had  been  abrogated.    If  their  first 
maxim  was  true,  that  we  are  to  look  for  the  whole  law  of  man's 
life  in  the  New  Testament,  all  their  conclusions,  even  though  they 
might  be  contradicted  by  actual  passages  in  it,  were  inevitable.  If 
it  can  be  shown  that  these,  or  any  portion  of  our  national  creed, 
are  denounced  in  the  New  Testament,  we,  of  course,  must  abandon 
them,  even  though  by  doing  so  we  involve  ourselves  in  the  most 
painful  perplexities  respecting  the  nature  and  the  permanence  of 
moral  principles.    Whether  they  are  so  denounced,  I  shall  have  to 
consider  presently.    What  I  am  maintaining  now  is,  that  the  mere 
absence  of  the  same  kind  of  language,  in  reference  to  these  subjects, 
which  occurs  in  every  page  of  the  Jewish  Scripture,  is  no  more  a 
proof  that  they  do  not  concern  us,  than  the  omission  of  any  direct 
allusion  to  the  principles  of  moral  philosophy  by  a  writer  on  politi- 
cal economy  is  a  proof  that  he  disbelieves  them. 

But  it  will  be  said,  these  two  cases  are  not  analogous,  or,  if 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


433 


they  are  analogous,  it  is  because  the  writers  on  political  economy 
ought  to  take  cognizance  of  moral  principles.    If  the  universal  so- 
ciety and  the  national  society  be  both  intended  for  man,  any  book 
which  sets  forth  the  character  of  either  must  touch  upon  the  nature 
and  laws  of  the  other.    Be  it  so  :  I  am  far  from  denying  this  as- 
sertion ;  it  is  one  which  I  especially  wish  that  the  reader  should 
feel  the  importance  of.    I  do  not  expect  to  find  the  principles  of 
the  universal  society  developed  in  the  Old  Testament,  nor  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  national  society  in  the  New.    I  do  expect  to  find 
each  illustrating  and  sustaining  the  other.     I  do  expect  that 
under  one  dispensation  as  much  as  the  other,  there  should  be  signs 
that  they  are  distinct  but  inseparable.    Such  signs  force  themselves 
upon  me  when  I  look  into  the  Jewish  records.    We  have  seen 
how  the  germs  of  an  universal  society  were  planted  in  the  heart  of 
the  Jewish  commonwealth  ;  how  the  existence  of  the  priest,  of  the 
sacrifices,  of  the  tabernacle,  as  much  testified  to  the  existence  of 
that  which  is  human  and  general,  as  the  king,  the  judge,  the  law 
testified  to  the  existence  of  that  which  is  peculiar  and  exclusive, 
The  words  at  first  sound  paradoxical ;  to  a  Jew  they  would  sound 
very  paradoxical.    He  would  say, '  Why,  our  likeness  consisted  ir 
those  features  which  you  set  down  as  peculiar,  our  difference 
in  those  which  you  set  down  as  common.'    Such  a  notion  i 
plausible  ;  I  have  already,  I  think,  explained  sufficiently  why  it  i 
not  true.    The  Hebrew  was  to  be  separate  from  all  other  people 
in  order  that  he  might  be  the  steward  of  a  possession  which  wa 
meant  for  all.    He  was  cut  off  that  he  might  witness  of  a  Being 
who  was  not  cognizable  by  the  senses,  not  material,  not  therefon 
divided,  not  belonging  to  this  or  that  locality.    When  the  membei 
of  the  nation  forgot  that  He  was  the  Lord  God  of  the  Hebrews 
and  sought  to  break  the  chain  of  his  peculiar  polity,  he  failed  t< 
perform  his  function,  he  failed  to  be  witness  for  a  God  of  the  who! 
earth.    WThen  he  refused  to  look  upon  his  covenant  as  capable  of  ex 
panding  to  comprehend  all  nations,  he  lost  his  peculiar  position,  hi 
became  the  member  of  a  sect,  instead  of  a  citizen  of  a  kingdom 
This  is  unquestionably  a  paradox,  but  it  is  the  paradox  of  Scripture 
well  worthy  of  our  observation  and  study.    I  say,  then,  that  ther 
was  a  human  element  in  the  national  society,  and  that  the  method 
by  which  this  element  was  incorporated  with  the  national  element 


434 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


and  yet  shown  to  be  distinct  from  it,  were  very  remarkable.  The 
priestly  tribe  is  one  of  the  twelve  tribes,  but  it  is  cut  off  from  all  the 
rest,  placed  under  particular  conditions,  supported  by  a  particular 
species  of  property.  From  the  very  commencement  of  the  com- 
monwealth, the  office  of  the  priest  and  the  lawgiver  are  carefully 
separated.  Both  are  equally  divine,  but  neither  may  intrude  upon 
the  functions  of  the  other.  And  this  is  not  because  the  office  of 
the  priest  is  limited  to  what  are  technically  called  religious  services. 
He  examines  the  leprous  man.  and  pronounces  whether  he  is  or  is 
not  fit  to  go  into  the  congregation  of  the  Lord ;  he  distinguishes 
between  the  meats  which  are  clean  and  unclean.  Whatever  has  to 
do  with  the  direct  oversight  of  that  which  is  internal,  whether  in 
the  physical  or  the  moral  life  of  man,  this  belongs  to  the  sacerdotal 
part  of  the  commonwealth  ;  whatever  has  to  do  with  the  outward 
regulation  of  society,  whether  those  regulations  have  reference  to 
the  bodily  comfort  or  to  the  behaviour  of  men,  this,  it  would  seem, 
belongs  to  the  legal  part  of  it.  Each  presents  the  unseen  Lord  to 
the  Israelites ;  the  one  as  a  Judge,  taking  cognizance  of  all  their 
acts  ;  the  other,  as  one  who  spies  out  all  their  ways,  knows  what  is 
passing  within,  deals  not  with  crimes  only,  but  with  sins ;  who  can 
take  away  the  source  of  evil  as  well  as  its  fruit,  At  the  same 
time,  as  there  is  no  division  between  the  internal  and  the  external 
life  of  man,  no  division  in  the  character  of  God  as  the  Lord  of  the 
outward  and  the  Lord  of  the  inward  world,  so  neither  is  therein  the 
Jewish  economy  between  the  offices  which  represent  him  in  these 
characters.  The  sacrifice  of  the  priest  is  necessary  to  hallow  the 
troops  which  the  king  is  leading  out  to  battle  ;  the  king  takes  part 
in  every  ecclesiastical  reformation.  We  feel  that  the  Jewish  com- 
monwealth is  one  society,  not  a  national  body  plus  an  ecclesiastical, 
but  a  body  which  could  not  be  national  if  it  were  not  ecclesiastical, 
or  ecclesiastical  if  it  were  not  national. 

Now  the  counterpart  of  these  signs  we  discover  in  both  the  two 
great  nations  in  the  pagan  world.  The  difference  between  them  is 
remarkable  and  characteristic.  In  the  heart  of  each  Greek  state, 
we  may  indeed  observe  a  priesthood,  exercising  some  important 
functions.  But  the  far  more  striking  object  which  presents  itself  to 
our  notice  is  the  sacred  ground  of  Elis,  the  common  temple  of  Del- 
phi.   These  were  the  signs  and  pledges  of  a  fellowship  between 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


435 


Greeks  as  Greeks,  w  hich  the  diversities  of  race,  and  the  antipathies 
of  democratical  and  aristocratical  governments  could  not  sever. 
On  the  other  hand,  in  Rome,  the  sacerdotal  influence  is  incorpora- 
ted with  all  the  national  institutions,  the  name  of  every  conspicu- 
ous office  in  the  republic  reminds  us  of  the  union.  And  it  was  this 
union  which  imparted  so  much  solidity  to  the  Roman  society,  after 
the  principles  upon  which  it  was  founded  had  been  set  at  nought, 
after  the  Roman  emperor  had  become  "  the  king  of  kings  and  lord 
of  lords,"  and  his  kingdom  had  been  changed  into  one  of  those 
which  are  described  in  Scripture  as  Babylonian  kingdoms,  resting 
upon  mere  power,  effacing  national  distinctions,  exalting  the  visible 
above  the  invisible. 

To  this  kingdom,  we  have  considered  the  kingdom  of  Christ  as 
the  direct  and  formal  opposite.  The  question,  then,  which  we  pro- 
posed before  we  entered  upon  the  examination  of  its  different  signs, 
whether  or  no  it  resembled  the  Roman  world  in  its  hostility  to  na- 
tional society,  or  whether  it  is  meant  to  be,  as  it  was  in  its  embryo 
condition,  the  quickening  spirit  of  national  society,  is  one  which  we 
are  bound  to  consider.  We  have  seen  that  it  had  its  cradle  in  a 
nation,  that  it  appeared  in  that  nation  at  a  time  when  the  old  spirit 
had  departed;  when  the  Jews  were  calling  themselves  Pharisees, 
Sadducees,  and  Essenes ;  were  striving  to  make  their  kingdom  into 
a  system  or  a  sect.  We  have  seen  that  the  disciples  of  Jesus  at 
once  went  back  to  the  old  language  of  their  countrymen,  refused  to 
be  spoken  of  as  a  sect  of  Nazarenes  or  Christians,  proclaimed  their 
Master  to  be  the  heir  of  David's  throne,  the  King  of  Israel,  declar- 
ed themselves,  and  invited  all  men  to  be  his  subjects. 

Such  a  pretension  was  intelligible  to  the  Jews;  by  them  it  was 
denounced  and  persecuted  ;  to  the  Romans  it  seemed  utterly  ridicu- 
lous. The  Christians  were  one,  perhaps  the  most  extravagant, 
but  certainly  the  least  rebellious,  of  the  Jewish  sects  ;  the  pro-con- 
suls in  the  different  provinces  were  willing  to  protect  them  against 
the  fanaticism  of  their  countrymen. 

It  was  a  little  different,  when  the  professors  of  the  new  doctrine 
were  brought  face  to  face  with  the  Caesars.  An  instinct  seemed  to 
tell  Nero  that  there  was  something  in  their  position  which  was  in- 
compatible with  his  ;  what  it  was,  however,  could  not  be  clearly 
understood  till  the  Jewish  polity  had  been  destroyed.    Then  this 


436 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


body  was  seen  still  to  remain,  still  to  be  adopting  that  language 
which  was  apparently  derived  from  the  old  Jewish  dreams  now  so 
signally  confuted.  The  still  Christians  speak  of  themselves  as  mem- 
bers of  a  kingdom.  The  exclusiveness  which  had  made  the  Jewish 
pretension  comparatively  harmless  was  not  preserved  in  them  :  they 
addressed  themselves  to  all  people  in  all  provinces  of  the  empire  ; 
they  bound  them  together  in  a  corporation,  held  them  in  one  by  a 
strange  free-masonry. 

The  most  philosophical  emperors  were  least  able  to  look  with 
indifference  upon  such  a  fellowship.  They  might  from  benignity 
or  contempt  deal  kindly  with  individual  cases,  but  the  society  was 
an  anomaly  incompatible  with  the  safety  of  the  government.  As 
that  government  approached  more  and  more  nearly  to  the  character 
of  a  military  despotism,  the  contest  between  it  and  the  spiritual  so- 
ciety became  more  flagrant,  the  necessity  that  one  or  the  other 
should  fall  more  evident.  When  Rome  became  almost  Asiatic 
under  Diocletian,  the  cross  had  attained  a  power  which  the  mild 
emperor  might  be  inclined  to  tolerate,  but  which  the  state  could 
not  endure.  But  the  most  vigorous  of  all  the  persecutions  failed  of 
its  object ;  the  new  kingdom  could  not  be  put  down  :  under  Con- 
stantine,  the  eagle  did  homage  to  it.  Then  the  organization  of  the 
Church  became  connected  with  that  of  the  empire ;  the  civil  dio- 
ceses became  coincident  with  the  jurisdictions  of  the  Bishops,  as 
well  in  Italy  as  in  the  provinces ;  the  ecclesiastical  officer  acquired 
a  civil  position,  the  emperor  exercised  more  or  less  of  jurisdiction  in 
spiritual  affairs. 

Here  was  the  phenomenon  of  a  superannuated  despotism,  based 
upon  the  acknowledgment  of  mere  power,  entering  into  union  with 
a  body  based  upon  the  acknowledgment  of  a  King  ruling  in  right- 
eousness, whose  strength  both  in  himself  and  in  his  disciples  had 
been  made  perfect  in  weakness.  The  alliance  had  not  been  sought 
by  the  Church ;  as  a  proof  of  her  Master's  dominion  it  was  to  be 
received  with  thankfulness;  as  a  part  of  God's  dispensations  to 
mankind  she  was  to  enter  into  it,  not  as  a  state  which  could  last, 
but  as  one  which  must  hasten  the  coming  of  a  new  order  of  things. 
The  change  of  the  centre  of  government  prepared  the  way  for  the 
approaching  revolution.  The  Byzantine  monarchy  might  be  con- 
sidered in  some  respects  a  new  one,  coming  into  existence  at  the 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


437 


very  time  Christianity  was  recognised,  not  necessarily  established 
upon  the  old  military  maxims.  But  these  maxims  were  implied  in 
it ;  there  was  the  same  effort,  however  checked  by  other  influences, 
after  uninversal  dominion.  The  dislocation  of  it  by  the  Mahome- 
tan conquests,  proved  that  such  a  dominion  is  one,  which,  in  con- 
junction with  Christianity,  cannot  exist.  In  the  West  the  demon- 
stration was  still  clearer.  The  century  after  Constantine  saw  the 
dissolution  of  a  frabric  which  had  stood  for  a  thousand  years. 
Charlemagne  re-established  it  as  a  Christian  empire;  in  the  next 
generation  it  is  again  shivered  into  fragments.  But,  meantime,  the 
Christian  Church  was  at  work  upon  the  barbarian  tribes.  And 
what  was  the  nature  of  the  operation  ?  Had  the  Bishops  of  the 
Church  acted  according  to  their  own  notions  of  what  was  best,  they 
would,  of  course,  have  reduced  Europe  into  one  great  society,  hav- 
ing a  common  language,  scarcely  acknowledging  any  territorial  or 
political  distinctions.  Such  a  dream  would  have  seemed  to  be  a 
most  pious  one,  carrying  out  the  idea  of  the  divine  commonwealth. 
That  they  entertained  it,  and  at  different  times  strove  to  realize  it, 
and  that  they  found  the  old  Roman  jurisprudence  a  helpful  aid  in 
the  experiment,  the  history  of  the  middle  ages  abundantly  testifies. 
But  how  was  it  defeated  ?  I  answer,  By  the  influences  which  they 
themselves,  when  acting  simply  as  Churchmen  in  their  appointed 
vocation,  and  not  as  agents  of  a  preconceived  system,  brought  to  bear 
upon  the  tribes.  The  ecclesiastical  society  was  the  main  instru- 
ment in  creating  within  each  of  these  tribes  a  distinct  national  or- 
ganization, altogether  different  from  the  ecclesiastical  organization, 
though  acting  in  concert  with  it;  by  the  ecclesiastical  or  Catholic 
spirit,  peculiarities  in  the  character  and  intellect  of  each  one  of 
these  tribes  were  developed.  The  Bishops  called  themselves  an 
Order,  said  that  they  received  their  commission  from  an  invisible 
King,  that  they  were  a  link  with  generations  past  and  generations 
to  come.  When  the  chieftain  who  came  into  the  land  previously 
subjected  to  Roman  government  found  this  order  established  and 
submitted  himself  to  it,  he  began  to  think  differently  of  his  own 
office,  to  consider  it  less  as  conferred  by  individual  powers  or  cun- 
ning, to  connect  it  less  with  the  sword  and  conquest,  more  with 
some  claim  of  religion.  If  these  first  notions  of  a  government  rest- 
ing upon  ordinance  perished  in  the  bud,  or  were  extinguished  by 


438 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


the  ruder  feelings  of  power  with  which  they  were  associated,  the 
tribe  remained  barbarous,  became  divided,  and  was  overcome  by 
some  other  more  capable  of  receiving  cultivation.  If  they  bore 
fruit,  (and  this  was  more  quickly  the  case  when  Bishops  were  the 
invaders  of  a  ground  previously  pagan  than  when  they  converted 
the  pagan  invaders  of  their  own,)  the  military  chief  over  some  dis- 
trict, or  the  bretwalda  over  several,  was  changed  into  the  king 
anointed  with  oil,  doing  homage  for  his  authority  to  Christ,  trans- 
mitting his  kingdom  in  a  hereditary  line.  He  has,  of  course,  his 
council  of  chieftains,  the  sharers  with  him  of  the  soil  which  he  has 
conquered.  The  Bishops,  as  possessing  greater  wisdom  and  a  char- 
acter of  sacredness,  are  invited  to  take  part  in  the  deliberations  of 
this  council.  Gradually  the  whole  council  begins  to  look  upon  it- 
self as  an  Order,  bound  together  by  another  tie  of  allegiance  to 
their  sovereign  than  that  of  mere  fellowship  in  arms  ;  holding  their 
lands  by  another  tenure  than  that  of  mere  conquest,  recognising  re- 
lations between  themselves  and  their  dependents.  Here  is  the  first 
form  of  a  national  society.  If  it  merely  stays  in  this  form,  it  will  be 
still  only  a  feudal  society :  but  it  may  gradually  develop  itself  under 
the  same  moral  influence,  till  one  and  another  portion  of  the  commu- 
nity shall  have  felt  itself  also  to  be  an  order,  shall  have  become  an 
integral  part  of  the  nation.  But  while  this  process  is  going  for- 
ward, we  find  indications  that  the  spiritual  society  itself  has  acquir- 
ed a  national  position.  It  had  established  itself  already  when  it  was 
a  missionary  body  first  in  some  great  city,  wThich  became  the  home 
of  its  Bishop  or  overseer ;  then  it  had  sent  forth  its  presbyters  into 
different  districts.  The  Bishops  become  permanently  connected 
with  the  cities,  the  districts  are  parishes  acknowledged  by  the  civil 
body  as  connected  with  an  ecclesiastical  jurisdiction.  The  owners 
of  the  soil  do  homage  to  this  arrangement ;  a  part  of  its  produce  is 
appropriated  to  the  teacher  of  the  district  in  which  it  is  found.  The 
wealth  of  individuals  is  voluntarily  contributed  for  the  purpose  of 
establishing  permanent  endowments  in  particular  districts,  or  for 
the  use  of  particular  districts  in  certain  diocesan  centres.  And  it 
begins  to  be  felt  more  and  more  that  the  spiritual  officer  is,  as  he 
was  among  the  Jews,  conversant  with  all  that  is  internal,  all  that 
lies  beyond  the  sphere  of  sense.  This  conviction  gives  rise  to 
schools  and  universities ;  first,  some  enlightened  ruler  establishes 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


439 


them,  then  some  noble  or  commoner,  interested  in  the  welfare  of  a 
certain  neighbourhood,  provides  funds,  which  may  enable  the 
objects  of  his  peculiar  care  to  share  in  the  general  education  of 
the  land. 

I  am  not  aware  that  any  of  these  statements  are  exclusively 
applicable  to  any  one  nation  of  modern  Europe.  Under  different 
modifications,  this  is  the  history  of  the  formation  of  modern  society. 
The  modifications  are  very  interesting  and  very  important,  be- 
cause they  illustrate  another  point  to  which  I  have  alluded ;  the 
way  in  which  the  characters  and  institutions  of  the  nations  received 
their  distinct  form,  so  that  there  should  be  vastly  more  difference 
between  Englishmen,  Frenchmen,  and  Germans  now,  than  there 
ever  can  have  been  between  Saxons,  Franks,  and  Burgundians 
twelve  hundred  years  ago.  Still  they  were  only  in  part  the  cause 
of  these  differences.  A  similar  tillage,  working  upon  different  soils, 
will  educe  all  their  latent  peculiarities,  will  make  it  manifest  what 
each  was  meant  to  bring  forth.  This  tillage  has  been  carried  on  by 
the  universal  society.  It  has  not,  as  we  have  seen,  acted  according 
to  its  own  notion ;  it  has  not  cast  Christendom  into  the  mould  into 
which  a  churchman  would  have  naturally  tried  to  cast  it.  There 
has  been  evidently  a  higher  will,  another  power  at  work,  crossing 
human  calculations.  But  if  we  trace  the  history  of  modern  Europe, 
we  see,  that  by  some  means  or  other,  a  witness  has  been  borne  to 
that  very  constitution  which  Scripture  makes  known  to  us.  The 
form  of  national  society  which  the  Old  Testament  invests  with  so 
much  sacredness,  is  reproduced  by  that  other  New  Testament  socie- 
ty which  seemed  to  have  displaced  it.  As  before,  a  spiritual  ele- 
ment was  proved  to  be  necessary  to  uphold  a  legal  society,  so  now, 
a  legal  element,  a  body  expressing  the  sacredness  and  majesty  of 
law,  is  shown  to  be  necessary  in  order  to  fulfil  the  objects  for  which 
the  spiritual  and  universal  society  exists.  In  what  way  each  is  ne- 
cessary to  the  other,  what  kind  of  duties  each  has  to  perform  for 
the  sake  of  the  other,  this  has  been  the  question  which  men  have 
constantly  asked  themselves,  and  to  which  they  have  invented  the 
most  opposite  answers.  Those  who  have  gone  along  with  us  in  our 
earlier  inquiries,  will  feel  that  this  question,  instead  of  being  obso- 
lete, was  never  so  much  present  to  men's  thoughts  as  at  the  present 
time.    And  they  will  feel  too,  perhaps,  that  though  the  speculations 


440 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


of  men  may  have  done  comparatively  little,  the  experience  of  the 
world  has  done  much,  in  supplying  an  answer  to  it.  The  legal 
power  can  no  longer  help  the  spiritual  powTer  by  persecuting  and 
putting  dowTn  its  enemies;  the  spiritual  power  can  no  longer  help 
the  legal  power,  by  throwing  a  fictitious  sacredness  around  it.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  spiritual  power  cannot  make  men  feel  that  there 
is  a  being  who  is  the  Judge  and  punisher  of  evil  acts,  unless  it  can 
show  that  his  authority  is  somewhere  impersonated  ;  the  legal  pow- 
er tries  in  vain  to  convince  those  who  are  subject  to  it,  that  there  is 
a  Being  who  can  renew  and  mould  the  will,  unless  it  can  show 
how  that  mighty  influence  is^exerted.  The  Church  wishes  to  make 
men  feel  that  they  are  subjects,  but  its  owTn  influence  is  one  which 
especially  aims  at  setting  them  free;  the  State  wishes  to  have  a 
free  intelligent  people,  but  it  has  itself  only  the  power  of  keeping 
men  servants.  If  any  great  work  is  to  be  done  for  man,  if  God's 
gracious  purposes  to  him  are  to  be  fulfilled,  one  would  think  that 
these  two  powers  must  be  meant  continually  to  act  and  react  upon 
each  other,  and  to  learn  better,  by  each  new  error  they  commit,  their 
distinct  functions — their  perfect  harmony. 


SECTION  II. 

THE  QUAKER. 

Sermon  on  the  Mount. — Different  passages  in  it  considered. — Provision  for  Ministers. 

The  Quaker  objects  to  this  whole  statement ;  formally  to  that 
part  of  it  which  treats  of  war,  oaths,  and  punishment,  and  of  a  na- 
tional provision  for  the  spiritual  body  ;  practically,  to  all  the  prin- 
ciples upon  which  these  institutions  have  been  defended.  4  Our 
arguments,'  he  says,  *  may  sound  plausible  enough  to  worldly  men  ; 
those  who  take  the  Gospel  simply,  and  try  to  form  themselves  ac- 
cording to  its  precepts,  find  them  directly  and  in  terms  contradicted 
by  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  The  highest  of  all  authorities  has 
said,  "  Swear  not  at  all ;"  "  resist  not  evil ;"  "  love  your  enemies.'* 
We  choose  to  say  that  the  practices  of  statesmen,  who  set  these 
precepts  aside,  are  reasonable  and  religious.  He  has  in  the  plainest 
words  annulled  the  maxims  of  the  old  dispensation  in  reference  to 


THE  QUAKER. 


441 


these  points  ;  it  pleases  us  to  affirm  that  they  are  still  binding.  But 
it  is  not  in  our  power  to  make  bitter  sweet,  or  evil  good,  though  we 
may  call  them  so;  men  will  be  judged  by  Christ's  commands,  not 
by  our  glosses  upon  them.  Our  theory,  however,  is  consistent,  if 
not  with  the  language  of  our  master,  at  least  with  our  own  prac- 
tice. We  wish  worldly  men  to  receive  us  into  their  houses  ;  it  is 
fitting  that  when  they  are  in  debt  one  hundred  measures  of  wheat 
to  their  Lord  we  should  bid  them  take  their  bills  and  write  four- 
score. If  we  become  pensioners  on  the  nation's  bounty,  we  must 
make  the  best  of  the  nation's  sins.  The  Apostles  followed  a  differ- 
ent rule.  They  lived  upon  the  love  of  their  flocks;  they  took  what 
was  cheerfully  given  them  by  those  whom  they  served.  We  have 
not  only  become  hirelings  instead  of  shepherds,  but  we  actually  boast 
of  the  change,  and  think  ill  of  them  who  will  not  submit  to  it.' 

I.  As  the  first  class  of  these  charges  turns  primarily  upon  the 
interpretation  of  the  fifth  chapter  of  St.  Matthew's  Gospel,  I  will 
enter  at  once  into  an  examination  of  that  portion  of  Scripture.  We 
are  accused  of  violating  the  spirit  of  it ;  of  perverting  the  letter  of 
it,  of  lowering  the  high  standard  of  duty  set  forth  in  it.  I  shall 
think  my  case  not  established,  if  I  fail  in  bringing  home  each  of 
these  charges  to  the  Quaker  himself. 

1.  It  is  impossible  to  read  the  first  sentences  of  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount,  without  feeling  that  they  must  be  in  some  measure  a 
key  to  its  whole  purpose.  The  series  of  blessings  upon  certain 
states  of  mind  compels  us  to  feel  that  we  are  in  the  presence  of 
One  who  is  come  to  establish  a  kingdom  in  the  inner-man  ;  to  deal 
with  the  principles  of  things  ;  to  lay  the  axe  to  the  roots  ;  to  bap- 
tize with  the  spirit  and  fire  ;  to  reform  the  fruit  by  reforming  the 
tree.  We  cannot  help  feeling,  that  however  little  worth  there  may 
be  in  the  notion  or  superstition  of  an  intended  parallelism  between 
the  mountain  on  which  the  trumpet  sounded  long  and  loud,  and 
that  on  which  Jesus  opened  his  mouth  and  spake,  the  principle  im- 
plied in  that  parallelism  is  exactly  true. 

2.  The  words,  "  Ye  are  the  salt  of  the  earth,  ye  are  the  light 
of  the  world"— the  exhortation  to  see  that  the  salt  possess  that 
quality  by  which  it  hinders  putrefaction  in  other  bodies,  and  do  not 
contract  their  tendency  to  corruption  ;  to  take  care  that  the  light 
be  not  quenched  by  the  inner  darkness  which  it  is  meant  to  pene- 


442 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


trate,  and  thus  be  prevented  from  manifesting  itself  outwardly  to 
men ; — these  exhortations  are  in  exact  accordance  with  that  which 
has  preceded  them,  and  show  forth  the  nature  of  the  authority  with 
which  the  new  teacher  spake,  and  which  distinguished  Him  from 
the  letter-hunting  Scribe.  In  all  these  passages  we  observe,  more- 
over, that  the  effects  which  are  promised  to  follow  from  these  states 
of  mind,  are  of  the  same  kind  with  themselves, —  are  distinctly  spi- 
ritual effects ;  the  poor  in  spirit  shall  understand  what  it  is  to  be 
brought  into  a  kingdom  ;  the  mourner  shall  be  comforted ;  the 
meek  shall  have  the  government  of  the  earth,  (shall  have  the  joy, 
the  greatest  he  can  know,  of  making  other  men  happy  ;)  the  mer- 
ciful shall  obtain  mercy  ;  those  that  hunger  and  thirst  after  right- 
eousness shall  obtain  righteousness ;  those  that  are  peace-makers 
shall  be  called  the  children  of  Him  who  is  the  great  Peace-maker ; 
the  pure  in  heart  shall  see  God  :  the  privilege  of  him  who  preserves 
the  salt  within  him  from  corruption,  is  that  he  shall  preserve  the 
earth  from  decay  ;  of  him  who  keeps  the  light  alive  within  him, 
that  men  shall  glorify  their  Father  which  is  in  heaven.  I  am 
anxious  to  make  this  remark,  because  it  is  my  object  to  show  how 
carefully  our  Lord  preserves  the  characteristics  of  his  kingdom,  and 
its  rewards,  from  all  secular  mixtures ;  how  he  transports  men  into 
a  region  entirely  unlike  that  with  which  they  are  ordinarily  con- 
versant, and  yet  their  own  native  region — the  region  of  their  own 
true  and  proper  being. 

3.  But  how  is  this  distinctness  preserved  ?  Is  it  by  denying  the 
existence  of  a  lower  outward  region  ?  Is  it  by  setting  aside  that 
lower  outward  region  as  being  in  itself  evil  and  impure  ?  Is  it  by- 
absorbing  all  influences  into  the  one  paramount,  transcendent  influ- 
ence ?  Or  is  it  precisely  by  taking  the  opposite  course  to  this,  by 
recognising  the  fact  and  reality  of  that  outward  world,  by  showing 
how  it  is  provided  for  in  God's  economy,  by  showing  what  relation 
it  bears  to  the  invisible  and  celestial  atmosphere,  which  informs  and 
encompasses  it  ?  Our  Lord's  next  words  answer  these  questions  : 
"  Think  not  that  I  am  come  to  destroy  the  law  and  the  prophets ; 
I  am  not  come  to  destroy,  but  to  fulfil.  Verily  I  say  unto  you,  Till 
heaven  and  earth  pass,  one  jot  or  one  tittle  shall  in  nowise  pass 
from  the  law  till  all  be  fulfilled."  It  may  be  as  well  to  remind  the 
reader,  since  every  word  in  this  memorable  passage  is  important, 


THE  QUAKER. 


443 


that  the  word  *  fulfil'  is  not  the  same  in  these  two  verses  ;  that  it 
would  be  better  to  translate  the  last  clause  of  the  eighteenth,  "  until 
all  things  have  been  done,  or  have  come  to  pass."  I  suppose  it  is 
our  inconvenient  version  which  has  given  colour  to  the  notion  that 
our  Lord  speaks  here  of  his  own  personal  obedience  to  the  law,  as 
that  which  should  practically  abrogate  it ;  as  if  He  had  said,  "  I 
am  come  to  fulfil  the  law,  and  when  I  have  fulfilled  it,  then  indeed 
it  may  pass  away ;  but  not  a  jot  or  tittle  of  it  till  then."  But  such 
an  exposition  as  this  destroys  the  connexion  of  the  passage  with  all 
that  preceded  it  and  all  that  follows  it.  The  sentence,  "  Whoso- 
ever, therefore,  shall  destroy  one  of  the  least  of  these  command- 
ments, and  teach  men  so,  shall  be  called  least  in  the  kingdom  of 
heaven,"  could  not  have  been  added,  if  the  law  were  spoken  of  as 
destroyed  by  the  work  of  Christ ;  for  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  that 
kingdom,  which  his  work  was  to  establish.  Our  Lord  must  there- 
fore use  the  word  fulfil  in  its  most  strict  and  ordinary  sense :  he 
must  mean,  that  he  is  come  to  give  that  which  fills  up  the  husk  of 
the  outward  law — its  kernel,  its  substance.  He  must  mean  further, 
that  this  kernel  or  substance  will  not  destroy  the  husk ;  that  that 
will  remain  still  in  all  its  dryness  and  literalness ;  not  one  jot  or 
tittle  of  its  enactments  abolished,  not  one  jot  or  tittle  of  its  autho- 
rity diminished,  until  all  things  be  done,  or  have  come  into  their 
perfect  estate  and  condition ;  till  formal  law  have  lost  its  applica- 
tion to  the  universe,  because  its  meaning  and  spirit  are  accomplish- 
ed in  every  human  creature.  Till  heaven  and  earth  have  passed 
away,— till  the  whole  existing  economy  of  things  has  ceased, — so 
long  as  there  is  any  evil  to  be  prevented  in  it, — so  long  as  there  is 
flesh  in  any  man  which  is  not  subject  to  the  will  of  God, — so  long 
law  in  its  outward  character  must  exist ;  and  he  is  the  least  in  the 
kingdom  of  heaven,  he  has  least  spiritual  intuition,  who  shall  try 
to  abridge  it  of  its  precepts  or  its  terrors. 

4.  Thus  far  every  thing  in  this  sermon  of  our  Lord  would  seem 
to  negative  the  opinion,  that  He  came  to  repeal  one  set  of  rules, 
and  establish  another.  Every  thing  would  seem  to  show,  that  He 
came  to  confirm  rules  existing  before ;  to  show  the  ground,  the 
inward  righteousness  of  these  rules ;  and  to  lead  those  who  were 
willing  to  be  his  disciples,  into  the  possession  and  enjoyment  of  it. 
The  next  words  greatly  strengthen  this  conclusion  :  "  Verily  I  say 


444 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


unto  you,  Except  your  righteousness  exceed  the  righteousness  of  the 
Scribes  and  Pharisees,  ye  shall  in  no  case  enter  into  the  kingdom 
of  heaven."  There  are  but  two  ways  of  interpreting  this  passage. 
The  one  treats  the  righteousness  required  of  the  disciples  as  some- 
thing different  in  degree  from  that  of  the  Scribes  and  Pharisees  ; 
the  other  as  different  in  kind.  If  the  former  notion  be  adopted, 
then,  indeed,  it  will  follow  inevitably,  that  our  Lord  comes  to  set 
aside  the  decrees  of  the  Mosaic  law,  and  to  establish  another  set  of 
stricter  decrees,  more  difficult  to  be  complied  with,  in  their  place. 
And  no  doubt  there  is  a  feelings  indicated  in  this  way  of  consider- 
ing these  words,  which  ought  not  to  be  despised.  It  is  so  common 
to  believe  that  the  Christian  economy  is  a  system  of  mitigations 
and  allowances,  mainly  valuable  because  it  dispenses  with  trouble- 
some restrictions  upon  self-indulgence  ;  that  it  is  no  wonder  honest 
men  should  be  startled  into  a  violent  reaction  against  this  notion, 
and  should  be  eager  to  press  all  Scripture  into  a  proof  that  the  re- 
quirements of  the  perfect  dispensation  are  really  higher  and  severer 
than  those  of  the  imperfect.  But,  after  rendering  full  honour  to 
the  truth  implied  in  this  exposition,  we  are  bound  to  say,  that  its 
fruits  have  been  most  pernicious ;  that  it  has  turned  the  Christian 
race  into  a  selfish  contest  who  should  gain  most  of  the  rewards  of 
a  future  state  ;  that  it  has  wholly  blinded  men  to  the  nature  and 
quality  of  these  rewards ;  that  it  has  destroyed  all  high,  pure,  dis- 
interested morality  ;  that  while  it  has  depraved  the  principles  of 
those  who  seemed  to  be  aiming  at  the  highest  ends,  it  has  done  in- 
finite injury  to  the  practice  of  those  who  were  content  with  lower 
achievements,  in  making  them  suppose  that  there  is  not  a  universal 
standard  to  which  all  men  must  be  conformed,  but  a  peculiar  stand- 
ard, which  men  may  choose  for  themselves ;  that  it  has  been  the 
parent  of  useless  superstition,  ecclesiastical  oppression,  on  the  one 
hand,  and  of  utterly  lax  and  reckless  habits  on  the  other;  in  fine, 
that  it  has  more  utterly  contradicted  the  whole  scope  and  meaning 
of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  than  any  other  opinion  which  has 
prevailed  in  the  Christian  world.  We  are  driven,  then,  to  the 
other,  which  is  the  interpretation  of  all  good  commentators, — that 
the  righteousness  which  exceeds  that  of  the  Scribes  and  Pharisees, 
is  one  which  is  spiritual  and  not  literal, — the  conformity  of  the  life 
and  character  to  the  original  mould  after  which  all  outward  laws 


THE  QUAKER. 


445 


are  fashioned, — the  pattern  on  the  Mount, —  and  not  the  mere  con- 
formity of  conduct  to  any  precepts.  And,  seeing  that  the  Phari- 
sees notoriously  had  the  idea  of  supererogation, — seeing  that  they 
did  themselves  suggest  to  their  disciples  a  more  exalted  righteous- 
ness than  that  of  the  multitude, — nay,  that  their  sect  was  based 
upon  the  profession  of  such  a  righteousness, — we  might  expect  our 
Lord  to  sohw  the  difference  between  this  sort  of  superlative  moral- 
ity and  his  own ;  we  might  expect  to  find  Him  showing  how  the 
one  actually  set  aside  the  law  in  attempting  to  refine  upon  it,  how 
the  other  sustained  the  law  while  impregnating  it  with  a  new  life ; 
we  might  expect  to  find  Him  showing  that  every  attempt  to  adapt 
or  modify  the  law,  for  the  purpose  of  reforming  and  exalting  the 
inner  life,  was  utterly  hopeless,  because  it  existed  for  quite  another 
purpose  ; — because  the  principle  to  which  it  was  the  finger-post 
was  something  quite  different  from  the  mere  exterior  command,  and 
could  not  be  extracted  from  it  by  any  twisting  of  its  formulas.  But 
we  should  certainly  not  expect  to  find  Him,  after  so  many  cautions, 
after  so  careful  a  declaration  of  his  object,  undertaking  to  annul 
any  of  the  precepts  which  He  was  not  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil,  or 
introducing  any  new  legal  dogmas  instead  of  them,  when  He  came 
to  bring  in  a  righteousness  that  is  above  all  dogmas. 

5.  Let  us  see,  then,  whether  he  disappoints  our  anticipations 
in  this  respect,  or  whether  every  passage  which  follows  is  not  a 
clear,  consistent,  and  beautiful  illustration  of  the  preface.  "  Ye 
have  heard  that  it  has  been  said  by  them  of  old  time,  Thou  shalt 
not  kill,  and  whosoever  shall  kill  shall  be  in  danger  of  the  judg- 
ment; but  I  say  unto  you,  that  whosoever  is  angry  with  his  brother 
without  a  cause  shall  be  in  danger  of  the  judgment ;  and  whoso- 
ever shall  say  to  his  brother,  Raca,  shall  be  in  danger  of  the  coun- 
cil ;  and  whosoever  shall  say,  Thou  fool,  shall  be  in  danger  of  hell 
fire."  What  consequences  would  follow  if  we  supposed  that  the  for- 
mula, "  It  has  been  said  by  them  of  old  time,  but  I  say,"  meant  in  this 
case,  "  I  am  about  to  tell  you  something  which  annuls  or  abolishes 
what  has  been  said  of  old  time  ?"  In  that  case  the  expressions,  "  He 
that  says  to  his  brother,  Raca,"  <c  he  that  says,  Thou  fool,"  must  be 
taken  in  just  the  same  formal  and  legal  sense  in  which  the  words, 
"  Thou  shalt  not  kill"  are  taken.  Words  which  are  meant  to 
supersede  and  abrogate  other  words,  must  be  construed  as  they 

29 


446 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


would  be  construed.  If  the  command,  "  Thou  shalt  not  kill,"  points 
to  a  definite,  specific  proceeding,  the  words,  Thou  shalt  not  give  this 
name  to  thy  brother,  must  point  to  a  specific,  definite  proceeding  also. 
Now,  who  does  not  see  what  a  shameful  limitation  of  these  sublime 
precepts,  what  low  superstition,  what  vile  hypocrisy  must  be  the 
result  of  such  an  interpretation  as  this  ?  And  who  does  not  know 
that  men  have  actually  fallen  into  all  these  evils  through  the  attempt 
to  ascertain  what  exact  amount  of  slander  and  vituperation  in  their 
own  language,  answered  to  the  Greek  pugs,  and  the  Syriac  Raca, 
and  in  what  degree  of  danger  they  therefore  were  of  the  judgment, 
the  council  and  hell  fire  ?  If  these  doubts  and  cases  of  conscience 
have  only  now  and  then  expressed  themselves  in  this  monstrous 
form ;  yet  it  is  easy,  from  many  indications,  to  perceive  that  they 
have  been  haunting  the  sin-darkened  minds  of  men,  and  that  they 
would  have  haunted  them  much  more,  if  there  had  not  been  teachers 
to  tell  them,  6  These  words  are  not  addressed  to  your  outward,  but 
to  your  inward  ear ;  the  words  "  Raca,"  and  "  Thou  fool,"  are 
merely  the  significant  indexes  of  certain  states  of  mind ;  the  anger 
without  a  cause,  is  the  commencement  of  the  disease ;  it  has  become 
chronic  when  it  finds  vent  in  words  of  fury ;  it  has  become  radical, 
it  has  infected  the  vitals  of  your  constitution,  when  it  finds  vent  in 
words  of  settled  scorn.  The  first  state  of  mind  subjects  you  to  a 
judgment ;  you  experience  separation  from  God  and  man ;  you 
cannot  feel  with  the  congregation,  you  cannot  pray  to  your  Father. 
This  condition  of  mind  may  pass  away,  if  "  thou  agree  with  thine 
adversary  quickly  whilst  thou  art  in  the  way  with  him ;"  if  the  ac- 
counts between  thee  and  thy  conscience  (thy  adversary)  are  settled, 
which  thouknowest  that  they  cannot  be  till  the  outward  account  with 
thy  brother  is  settled  too.  But  take  care  that  thou  do  not  let  it  harden 
into  the  second  condition. — that  will  subject  thee  to  the  council, — a 
more  complete,  thorough  alienation  from  all  heavenly  feelings,  all 
peaceful  hopes,  all  capacity  of  entering  into  communion  with  God. 
Still  God's  discipline  may  work  a  cure  of  this  also ;  but  there  is  a 
period  when  all  discipline  has  been  tried  in  vain  ;  when  the  sentence 
on  the  soul  is,  "Let  it  alone;"  then  must  it  be  left  to  those  raging 
and  consuming  fires,  which  could  not  be  quenched  by  the  love  of  God, 
of  which  the  fires  burning  without  the  city  of  Jerusalem,  to  consume 
its  rubbish  and  its  offal,  are  the  only  sufficient  emblems.' 


THE  QUAKER. 


447 


Such  is  the  meaning,  so  spiritual  and  so  awful,  which  we  are 
allowed  to  put  upon  our  Lord's  words,  while  we  feel  that  they  be- 
long to  us  in  our  highest,  most  responsible,  and  most  perilous  con- 
dition of  immortal  and  spiritual  beings,  taken  into  covenant  with 
God,  brought  into  fellowship  with  our  brethren,  submitted  to  the 
government  and  education  of  his  holy  Spirit.  Such  is  the  meaning 
wThich  we  must  abandon,  in  favour  of  some  barren,  hungry  interpre- 
tation, fretting  to  the  conscience,  profitless  to  the  heart,  the  moment 
we  forget  our  Lord's  words,  that  He  came  not  to  destroy  the  law 
but  to  fulfil  it ;  the  moment  we  permit  ourselves  to  imagine  that  his 
work  was  to  substitute  one  formal  precept  for  another,  and  not 
rather  to  stanch  the  fountain  of  evil  in  the  heart,  whence  had  pro- 
ceeded all  those  crimes  against  which  the  outward  law  was  the  true 
and  permanent  witness. 

6.  The  next  two  passages  refer  to  the  Marriage-bond  ;  one  to 
the  prohibition  of  Adultery  by  the  law,  the  other  to  its  toleration 
of  Divorce.  In  the  first  case  the  meaning  is  evident.  Our  Lord 
comes  not  to  destroy,  but  to  fulfil.  He  leaves  the  precept  against 
adultery  as  He  finds  it,  and  stamps  it  with  new  authority.  Still  it 
belongs  to  the  1  old  time.'  He  has  a  message  to  the  inner  man. 
He  aims  not  at  the  crime,  but  at  the  sin.  "  Look  not  upon  a  woman 
to  lust  afier  her "  If  thy  right  eye  offend  thee,  pluck  it  out;" 
"  If  thy  right  hand  offend  thee,  cut  it  off."  Be  willing  to  sacrifice 
the  exercise  of  powers  which  God  meant  thee  to  exercise,  the  en- 
joyments of  sense  which  God  has  given  thee,  if  thou  findest  them 
to  minister  to  thy  inward  corruption,  and  so  to  hinder  thee  from 
attaining  the  higher  joys  of  the  spiritual  kingdom.  For  it  is  better 
to  enter  into  life  halt  and  maimed,  to  have  the  spirit  itself  pure  and 
free,  at  the  cost  of  some  of  its  tools  and  ministers,  than  having  two 
hands  and  two  feet,  having  all  thy  powers  and  thy  senses  at  liberty, 
to  be  cast  into  hell  fire,  to  be  consumed  by  tyrant  lusts,  and  an 
ever-renewing  remorse.  This  is  the  very  principle  and  illustration 
of  inward  spiritual  discipline. 

The  next  clause  is,  at  first  sight,  more  puzzling.  Our  Lord 
seems  to  be  repealing  the  Mosaic  law  of  divorce,  though  He  ex- 
pressly disclaimed  the  intention  of  repealing  any  jot  of  it.  But,  if 
we  consider  a  moment,  we  shall  perceive  that  there  is  no  inconsis- 
tency.   The  Law  of  Moses  was  not  meant  to  encourage  divorces. 


448 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


It  was  meant  to  throw  obstacles  in  their  way.  For  the  Jew,  instead 
of  being  allowed  to  send  away  his  wife  whenever  he  conceived  a 
displeasure  against  her,  was  obliged  to  resort  to  a  legal  instrument ; 
he  must  have  a  bill  of  divorcement.  Thus  much  the  law  could 
do  to  witness  for  the  sanctity  of  Marriage.  More  it  could  not  do, 
because  of  the  hardness  of  heart  in  those  with  whom  it  had  to  deal. 
Prohibitory  or  penal  enactments  could  not  of  themselves  preserve 
that  primal  law  of  creation  which  God  established,  when  He  made 
them  male  and  female.  To  fulfil  the  end  which  they  wish  to  com- 
pass, the  new  dispensation  exhibits  marriage  as  a  lower  form  and 
image  of  its  greatest  mystery,  imparting  to  it  a  sacred  and  only 
not  sacramental  dignity. 

7.  And  now  we  are  come  to  one  of  the  points  of  dispute  between 
us  and  the  Quaker.  "  It  has  been  said  by  them  of  old  time,  Ye 
shall  not  forswear  yourselves,  but  ye  shall  perform  unto  the  Lord 
your  oaths  ;  but  I  say  unto  you,  Swear  not  at  all,  neither  by  heaven, 
for  it  is  God's  throne,  neither  by  the  earth,  for  it  is  his  footstool, 
neither  by  Jerusalem,  for  it  is  the  city  of  the  Great  King,  nor  by 
your  head,  for  you  cannot  make  one  hair  of  it  white  or  black." 

Now,  I  do  not  say  that  the  Quaker  may  not  be  able  to  prove 
that  this  passage  forbids  all  oaths,  judicial  and  religious,  as  well  as 
vituperative  and  conversational.  But  I  do  say,  that  this  is  not  the 
view  of  the  text  which  would  suggest  itself  to  any  literal  interpreter 
who  reads  the  whole  sermon,  and  seeks  to  interpret  one  part  of  it 
by  another.  No  literal  interpreter  could  treat  with  indifference  the 
repetition  of  the  formula,  "  It  hath  been  said  by  them  of  old  time, 
but  I  say  unto  you,"  or,  without  the  strongest  reason,  could  affix 
an  opposite  meaning  to  it  in  one  place  from  that  which  it  evidently 
bears  in  three  others.  No  literal  interpreter  could  disregard  the 
circumstance,  that  not  one  of  the  oaths  which  our  Lord  instances 
as  illustrative  of  his  prohibition  is  a  judicial  oath  ;  that  every  one 
of  them  is  just  the  kind  of  oath  which,  from  the  analogy  of  other 
nations,  we  should  suppose  would  be  used  in  familiar  discourse. 
No  literal  interpreter  would  be  heedless  of  the  circumstance,  that  the 
communication  (Aoyo*;),  which  is  to  be  yea,  yea,  nay,  nay,  cannot, 
without  a  most  strange  use  of  language,  imply  a  formal,  legal  pro- 
cedure. While,  therefore,  I  am  far  from  assuming  that  the  Quakers 
may  not  be  able  to  overreach  all  these  a  priori  arguments  against 


THE  QUAKER. 


449 


their  view  of  the  passage,  I  maintain  that  they  have  not  the  shadow 
of  a  plea  for  putting  themselves  forward  as  strict  interpreters,  and 
for  denouncing  our  laXness.  They  are  bound  to  show  some  cause 
why  our  Lord  should  in  this  instance  have  violated  the  method  and 
coherency  of  his  discourse ;  why  He  should  introduce  this  instance 
of  an  old  law,  in  seeming  illustration  of  his  principle,  "  that  he 
has  not  come  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil,"  when  it  is  a  direct  exception 
from  that  principle  ;  why  He  should  have  connected  it,  by  the  use 
of  a  common  phrase,  with  two  other  cases,  which  did  most  remark- 
ably enforce  and  expound  it. 

The  only  effort,  so  far  as  I  know,  which  they  make  to  defend 
their  theory  against  these  apparently  powerful  presumptions,  con* 
sists  in  such  assertions  as  these  : — "  That  the  words, '  swear  not  at  all/ 
are  clear  and  obvious  words,  spoken  for  the  use  of  poor  and  ignorant 
people,  by  one  who  came  to  preach  the  Gospel  to  the  poor ;  that,  let 
commentators  say  what  they  will,  any  ordinary  man  taking  up  the 
Bible,  and  finding  such  a  command  as  this,  would  suppose  it  to  govern 
all  possible  cases,  and  not  a  few  particular  cases;  that  it  is  impossible 
to  discover  any  line  of  moral  distinction  between  an  oath  in  private, 
and  an  oath  in  a  court  of  justice ;  and,  lastly,  that  the  prohibition  of 
private,  conversational  swearing,  was  superfluous, — no  one  in  old 
time,  or  in  any  time,  supposed  that  to  be  lawful."  With  respect  to 
the  first  of  these  arguments,  I  shall  not  stop  to  inquire  with  what 
grace  it  comes  from  those  who  have  particularly  prided  themselves 
on  the  discovery  of  meanings  in  Scripture,  which  do  not  present 
themselves  to  the  ordinary,  thoughtless  reader,  but  which  commend 
themselves,  as  they  say,  to  the  spiritual  man.  I  do  not  ask  whether 
they  are  just  the  persons  to  complain  of  us  for  not  adopting  the 
most  superficial,  outside  view  of  a  passage  which  presents  itself; 
but  I  at  once  grapple  with  the  difficulty.  I  take  an  ordinary  Eng- 
lish peasant,  possessing  just  so  much  intelligence  and  religious  feel- 
ing as  makes  him  capable  of  attaching  any  meaning  at  all  to  the 
passage ;  I  say  that  such  a  man  would  not  be  nearly  so  likely  to 
suppose  that  our  Lord  meant  him  to  abstain  from  judicial  oaths,  be- 
cause he  said,  "  Swear  not  at  all,"  as  he  would  be  to  think  that  our 
Lord  meant  him  to  injure  some  of  his  members,  because  He  said, 
"If  thy  right  hand  offend  thee,  cut  it  off,  if  thy  right  eye  offend 
thee,  pluck  it  out."    Not  nearly  so  likely,  and  for  this  reason,  that 


450 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


he  would  have  a  practical  test  of  the  meaning  in  the  one  case, 
which  he  would  not  have  in  the  other.  This  peasant  knows  per- 
fectly well,  that  the  feeling  with  which  he  goes  into  a  solemn  court 
of  justice,  and  in  the  presence  of  men  in  solemn  official  costume, 
calls  God  to  witness  that  the  words  he  is  about  to  speak  are  true, 
is  as  different  a  feeling  from  that  by  which  he  is  influenced  when 
he  takes  the  same  holy  name  into  his  lips,  to  confirm  some  chance 
word  which  he  has  uttered  over  his  cups  in  the  tap-room,  as  any  two 
that  ever  dwelt  in  the  same  individual  can  possibly  be.  It  would 
never  occur  to  him  for  an  instant  to  compare  the  two  acts  together, 
except,  indeed,  in  this  way ;  he  has  seen,  that  the  persons  who  are 
most  in  the  habit  of  using  oaths,  and  trifling  with  the  name  of  God 
in  common  conversation,  are  those  on  whom  an  oath  judicially  ad- 
ministered has  least  effect,  and  who  are  most  likely  to  forswear 
themselves.  If,  then,  it  is  meant  that  the  real  wayfaring  man  will 
be  particularly  likely  to  discover  any  perplexity  or  contradiction 
here,  I  believe  it  is  a  mistake ;  I  do  not  say  that  he  may  not, — be- 
cause I  do  not  say  that  he  may  not  be  perplexed  with  any  passage 
of  Scripture.  I  have  urged  already,  that  a  personal  ministry  is  just 
as  necessary  to  him,  and  has  been  just  as  much  appointed  for  him, 
at  the  Written  Word  itself,  and  that  one  is  not  in  general  intended 
to  profit  him  without  the  other.  All,  therefore,  that  I  need  main- 
tain here  is,  that  my  view  of  the  passage,  when  it  is  set  before  him, 
instead  of  seeming  to  be  more  difficult,  more  contrary  to  his  previ- 
ous expectations,  will  be  much  more  intelligible,  and  much  better 
interpret  to  him  his  own  experience.  For  instance  ;  to  a  congre- 
gation of  English  countrymen,  I  should  speak  witii  the  most  per- 
fect confidence,  that  what  I  said  would  approve  itself  to  their 
hearts  and  understandings,  some  such  words  as  these :  "  My  friends, 
the  assizes  are  to  be  held  to-morrow  in  the  county  town,  three 
miles  from  our  village.  Several  of  you  are  summoned  to  be  wit- 
nesses there ;  now,  that  you  may  understand  what  you  have  to  do, 
and  in  what  spirit  you  ought  to  go  about  this  work,  I  shall  explain 
to  you  this  morning  a  passage  out  of  our  Lord's  Sermon  on  the 
Mount.  You  know  I  have  told  you  very  often  that  the  Bible  is  not 
a  show-book,  written  about  things  which  have  nothing  to  do  with 
you,  but  one  that  concerns  all  your  common  business,  and  tells  you 
how  to  set  about  it  in  a  right  way.    Well,  then,  attend  to  this 


THE  QUAKER.  451 

passage.  It  begins  so : — '  It  hath  been  said  by  them  of  old  time, 
Thou  shalt  not  forswear  thyself,  but  thou  shalt  perform  unto  the 
Lord  thine  oaths.'  Now,  first,  you  would  like  to  know  who  it  is 
that  said  this  in  old  time.  If  you  look  back  a  few  verses  in  this 
chapter,  you  will  see  it  is  written,  4  It  has  been  said  of  old  time, 
Thou  shalt  not  kill ;'  and  again,  a  few  verses  lower,  '  It  has  been 
said  of  old  time,  Thou  shalt  not  commit  adultery.'  These  com- 
mands were  given  of  old  time  to  the  Jews.  You  know  who  gave 
them.  Just  now  I  was  reading  them  to  you  from  the  altar,  and 
before  them  all  I  read,  '  God  spake  these  words  and  said  ;' — God 
declared  himself  to  the  Jews  as  their  King,  and  He  told  them 
amidst  thunders  and  lightnings  that  these  laws  were  his  laws ;  that 
when  they  broke  any  of  these  laws  they  disobeyed  Him,  and  that 
misery  and  destruction  would  follow.  I  have  often  talked  to  you 
about  the  history  of  the  Jews.  You  know  they  tried  whether  it 
was  true  or  not  that  misery  and  destruction  would  follow  if  they 
broke  God's  commands ;  they  tried,  and  found  that  it  was  true. 
Misery  did  follow,  till  at  last  they  were  sent  away  into  a  strange 
land.  Well !  as  God  commanded  the  Jews  not  to  kill  and  not  to 
commit  adultery,  so  He  commanded  them  not  to  forswear  them- 
selves, but  to  perform  unto  Him  their  oaths.  Our  Lord,  you  see, 
puts  the  same  honour  upon  all  these  commands.  He  speaks  of 
each  of  them  as  '  what  was  spoken  in  old  time ;'  that  is  to  say, 
what  God  spake  of  old  time  to  his  people,  and  what  they  had  pre- 
served as  his  commands.  And  I  tell  you,  my  friends,  that  if  the 
Jews  had  forgotten  this  command,  they  would  have  been  just  as  ill 
off  as  if  they  had  forgotten  either  of  the  others.  They  were  held 
together  as  a  people  by  having  God's  name  put  upon  them ;  there- 
fore, when  they  came  together  as  a  people,  to  have  any  solemn 
transactions  with  each  other,  they  were  bound  to  remember  that 
they  were  in  God's  presence ;  that  God  was  looking  on  their 
words  and  intentions ;  and  that  He  would  be  avenged  on  them  if 
they  did  not  act  honestly  by  each  other.  An  oath  in  a  court  of 
justice  says  this,  '  We  are  in  God's  presence,  and  we  know  He 
is  a  witness  whether  we  speak  truth  or  lies,  and  He  is  a  God 
of  truth,  and  will  be  avenged  upon  [us  if  we  speak  lies.  If 
the  Jews  had  forgotten  that  they  were  to  perform  unto  the  Lord 
their  oaths ;  if  the  rulers  of  the  land  had  not  enforced  oaths  upon 


452 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


them,  they  would  have  been  guilty  of  a  great  sin ;  they  would 
have  refused  to  bear  witness  for  God,  as  He  told  them  to  bear  wit- 
ness of  Him ;  and  I  say  again,  it  would  have  fared  as  ill  with 
them,  the  nation  would  as  much  have  fallen  to  pieces,  (because 
there  would  have  been  no  fear  of  God,  no  feeling  that  He  was  near 
them,)  as  if  they  had  committed  murder  or  adultery.  Yea,  what  is 
more,  they  would  have  committed  murder  and  adultery,  because 
the  thought  of  God,  which  keeps  men  out  of  these  courses,  would 
have  departed  from  them.  Now,  my  friends,  our  nation  of  Eng- 
land acknowledges  God  for  its  King,  just  as  much  as  the  nation 
of  the  Jews  did.  We  call  Him,  in  our  prayer  for  Queen  Victoria, 
*  King  of  kings  and  Lord  of  lords.'  Just  as  He  was  the  King 
over  King  David,  so  He  is  the  King  over  our  Queen.  And  our 
laws  which  say,  '  Thou  shalt  not  kill,  thou  shalt  not  commit  adul- 
tery,' are  God's  laws  ;  they  are  not  the  Queen's  laws ;  she  did  not 
make  them,  nor  any  king  or  queen  that  was  before  her.  She  and 
her  servants  execute  them,  and  she  and  they  are  answerable  to 
God  how  they  execute  them.  But  they  were  made  of  old  time — 
God  made  them,  and  God  enforces  them  ;  and  we  are  to  perform 
all  our  transactions  as  in  his  presence,  knowing  that  He  is  the  wit- 
ness of  what  we  do.  And  our  rulers  are  bound  to  tell  us  this ;  to 
put  us  in  mind  of  it,  and  on  all  solemn  occasions,  when  we  meet 
as  in  a  court  of  justice,  they  must  urge  us  to  say  out  boldly,  that  we 
know  and  feel  that  the  eye  of  the  unseen  God  is  upon  us,  and  upon 
what  we  do,  and  upon  what  we  say,  and  upon  what  we  think. 
Remember  this  when  the  book  is  put  into  your  hands  to  swear ; 
remember  that  you  are  declaring  then,  in  that  court,  that  God's 
eye  is  upon  ycu,  and  that  you  believe  He  will  teach  you  to  speak 
truth,  and  that  you  believe  He  will  be  avenged  upon  you  if  you 
lie.  But  I  have  something  more  to  say  to  you  yet.  I  have  told 
you  often,  that  all  the  laws  in  the  world  will  never  make  us  good 
men.  They  are  '  a  terror  to  evil  doers,  and  a  praise  and  protection 
to  them  that  do  well.'  But  they  will  never  put  one  right  thought 
into  your  heart,  they  will  never  make  your  heart  pure  and  holy. 
The  laws  cannot,  but  He  who  gave  the  laws  can ;  and  this  is  what 
the  second  part  of  our  Lord's  words  is  about.  He  says,  '  It  has 
been  said  by  them  of  old  time,'  (that  is,  in  other  words,  I,  the  Lord 
Jesus  Christ,  said  in  old  time,  for  it  was  He  who  gave  the  law,) 


THE  QUAKER. 


453 


'  thou  shalt  not  forswear  thyself, but  thou  shalt  perform  unto  the  Lord 
thine  oaths.'  But  I  am  not  going  to  tell  you  this  again.  It  has 
been  said  once,  and  it  lasts  always.  I  have  now  a  new  message  to 
you.  There  are  some  of  you  who  think  that  you  must  be  very 
careful  of  using  the  word  God  in  your  familiar  talk,  because  God 
hath  set  apart  that  for  solemn  purposes ;  but  you  do  not  think  much 
of  swearing  by  heaven,  or  earth,  or  by  Jerusalem,  or  by  your  head, — 
you  do  not  care  how  lightly  you  use  these  oaths.  Now,  whether 
you  know  it  or  not,  this  arises  from  want  of  reverence  for  God.  You 
think  it  is  just  the  name  that  is  sacred.  Oh,  no !  Every  thing  is 
sacred.  Look  up  to  the  wide  heaven  over  your  head ;  the  sun 
speaks  of  God,  the  moon  speaks  of  Him,  the  firmament  speaks  of 
Him.  Look  at  the  earth  ;  every  tree,  and  every  plant,  and  flower 
speaks  of  Him.  Go  into  Jerusalem  ;  there  is  the  Temple  in  which 
God  has  promised  to  dwell.  Think  of  your  own  head ;  there  is  a  wit- 
ness for  God ;  it  is  He  who  preserves  every  hair  of  it.  I  say,  then, 
*  Swear  not  at  all.'  If  you  trifle  with  an  oath,  you  trifle  with  God,  in 
whose  presence  you  are  living,  and  moving,  and  having  your  being. 

"  My  friends,  these  are  the  words  of  Christ's  new  covenant. 
They  were  not  spoken  to  the  disciples  only,  they  are  spoken  to 
you  who  are  under  this  covenant.  You  are  baptized  men,  children 
of  God,  members  of  Christ,  heirs  of  heaven.  Christ  has  other, 
better,  higher,  more  acceptable  words  for  you  than  those  which  He 
spoke  in  old  time.  He  tells  you  that  He  has  brought  you  into 
God's  immediate  presence,  that  He  has  adopted  you  into  his  family, 
that  He  has  sealed  you  with  his  Spirit.  He  beseeches  you  to  re- 
member that  you  have  this  high  honor,  this  unspeakable  glory; 
and  therefore  He  says  to  the  heart  of  each  one  of  you, 1  Swear  not 
at  all'  When  thou  goest  forth  to  thy  work  in  the  morning,  look 
cheerily  and  reverently  up  to  heaven  and  say, — '  That  sky  under 
which  I  am  to  labour  to-day  is  my  Father's  throne;  it  is  a  holy 
thing ;  I  must  not  trifle  with  it.  This  earth,  which  I  am  to  till 
with  the  sweat  of  my  brow,  is  my  Father's  footstool ;  He  cares 
for  it ;  He  causes  it  to  bud  and  bring  forth :  this,  too,  is  a  holy 
thing.'  When  you  go  into  the  town  to  market,  look  up  at  the 
churches  and  say, — 'This,  too,  is  my  Father's  dwelling-place; 
these  are  witnesses  that  I  am  a  citizen  of  the  New  Jerusalem,  that 
I  belong  to  an  innumerable  company  of  saints  and  angels,  and  that 


454 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


all  these  men  who  are  about  me,  are  of  the  same  family.  The  city 
and  the  men  in  it  are  holy.'  When  you  return  home  at  night,  and 
lie  down  on  your  bed,  and  no  one  else  is  near  you,  think,  that  *  in 
this  body  of  mine  God  hath  said  He  will  dwell,  and  make  it  his 
temple :  this,  too,  is  a  holy  thing.' 

"  Yes  !  it  is  your  privilege  as  Christians,  to  have  these  calm, 
happy  thoughts  wherever  you  go,  whatever  you  are  doing.  These 
are  the  thoughts  of  new  men,  who  believe  themselves  redeemed  to 
God  by  the  blood  of  Christ.  Think  how  contrary  to  them  every 
idle  oath  is !  What  pride  there  is  in  it !  What  contempt  of  God  ! 
What  setting  up  of  ourselves !  And,  in  general,  what  cruelty  to 
our  brethren !  Depend  upon  it,  every  such  oath  makes  men  feel 
God's  oaths  less  sacred,  makes  men  more  likely  to  forswear  them- 
selves when  they  are  sworn  in  a  court  of  justice.  If  you  think  it 
would  be  very  horrible  to  commit  such  a  crime — if  you  wish  to 
obey  Christ's  first  command, '  Perform  unto  the  Lord  thy  oaths;' 
see  that  you  attend  to  his  second  command,  by  not  swearing  at  all 
in  your  communications  one  with  another ;  see  that  you  get  the 
spirit  of  these  commands  into  you,  by  remembering  at  all  times,  in 
all  places,  that  you  are  in  the  presence  of  a  Father  who  loves  you, 
and  that  all  things  testify  of  Him.  Then  you  may  go  to  Court  to- 
morrow with  free,  clear  spirits ;  you  will  not  have  to  think  as  slaves 
and  cowards  think — I  must  not  tell  a  lie,  for  then  I  shall  be  prose- 
cuted for  perjury,  or  be  turned  out  of  my  place,  or  be  pointed  at  by 
other  people — but  you  will  speak  the  truth,  and  the  whole  truth, 
and  nothing  but  the  truth,  because  God  is  truth,  and  because  you 
know  that  they  who  tell  lies  cannot  stand  in  his  sight ;  but  that 
every  true-hearted  servant  and  child  of  his  He  will  help  and  bless, 
and  bring  them  on  farther  and  farther  in  the  knowledge  of  himself." 

I  think  there  is  nothing  in  this  which  a  plain  man  would  reject 
as  unintelligible,  or  an  honest  man  as  sophistical.  It  marks  out  a 
great  moral  distinction  between  two  acts,  which  Quakers  have  has- 
tily confounded  together,  merely  because  they  have  a  common 
name.  It  shows  that  there  was  a  reason  for  giving  this  command 
against  conversational  swearing  in  this  place;  for  though  the  Jews 
had  not  argued  that  they  might  trifle  with  oaths,  because  they  were 
directed  to  use  them  on  the  most  solemn  and  sacred  occasions — that 
was  a  subtlety  which  never  suggested  itself  to  their  minds,  ingeni 


THE  QUAKER.  455 

ous  as  they  were  in  finding  a  plea  for  their  evil  practices  by  a  tor- 
tured application  of  the  letter  of  the  law — but  they  had  persuaded 
themselves  that  if  they  abstained  from  the  dreadful  name  of  Jeho- 
vah, they  did  not  invade  the  awfulness  of  oaths  by  using  them 
familiarly.  And  in  striking  at  this  hypocritical  notion,  our  Lord 
was  able  to  throw  a  new  and  brilliant  light  upon  his  own  dispen- 
sation, to  show  how  it  was  that  He  came  to  bring  men  into  the 
very  presence  of  God,  to  hallow  every  place  with  his  presence, 
and  to  bind  together  the  awful  feeling  of  a  distinct  personality,  an 
unutterable  name,  which  had  possessed  the  heart  of  the  Hebrew 
with  that  feeling  of  a  God  everywhere,  which  had  been  struggling 
with  it  in  the  conceptions  of  the  Greek  Pantheist.  This  prohibi- 
tion wras  not  a  superfluous  thing  for  that  time,  or  for  any  time.  It 
associates  a  rule  of  daily  life  with  the  most  deep  principles  of  our 
being.  Adopt  the  Quaker  notion  of  the  passage,  and  our  Lord 
says,  in  ^sermon  especially  addressed  to  the  heart  and  conscience 
of  men, — "  Once,  without  a  reason,  I  told  you  to  do  a  certain  act, 
now,  without  a  reason,  I  tell  you  not  to  do  that  act."  Adopt  our 
view  of  it,  and  we  see  the  eternal  grounds  of  these  precepts  in  two 
principles,  alike  involved  in  the  constitution  of  man,  each  developed 
in  its  due  season,  (one  by  the  teacher  who  had  the  veil  over  his 
countenance,  the  other  by  Him  who  came  to  show  forth  the  express 
image  of  God  in  human  flesh,)  each  to  be  upheld  for  the  sake  of 
the  other,  each  losing  its  own  stability  when  the  other  is  for- 
gotten. 

8.  The  Quakers,  and  those  who  adopt  their  theory  respecting 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  make  scarcely  any  distinction  between  the 
two  following  paragraphs.  The  two  old  sayings,  "  An  eye  for  an 
eye,  and  a  tooth  for  a  tooth,"  and  "  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbour 
and  hate  thine  enemy,"  are  taken  to  be  proverbs  of  nearly  the 
same  import,  expressing  generally  the  savage  character  of  the  an- 
cient dispensation,  for  which  Christ  substitutes  the  mild  spirit  of  the 
new.  Surely  that  interpretation  must  be  intrinsically  vicious,  which 
confounds  together  two  maxims,  as  different  in  their  objects  and 
application  as  any  that  ever  were  expressed  in  human  language. 
The  first  manifestly  applies  to  the  judicial  proceedings  of  the  com- 
monwealth, the  second  to  its  external  relations.  Whether  good 
or  evil,  barbarous  or  gentle,  they  do  not  mean  the  same  thing ;  and 


456  6 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


every  person  who  really  wishes  to  interpret  our  Lord's  words 
strictly,  will  examine  them  separately. 

To  begin  with  the  words,  "  An  eye  for  an  eye,  a  tooth  for  a 
tooth." 

The  feeling  of  retribution  and  compensation, — that  every  in- 
jury should  have  its  just  recompense, — that  the  evil  suffered  shall 
be  proportionate  to  the  evil  done, — you  see  working  in  the  heart 
of  every  savage,  you  see  secretly  prompting  and  justifying  his  acts 
of  blind  fury  and  punishment.    To  be  sure  he  constantly  passes 
the  limit ;  he  makes  the  satisfaction  exacted  far  exceed  the  wrong 
committed,  and  for  that  excess  his  conscience  reproaches  him.  Con- 
fused as  his  perceptions  are,  you  may  make  him  acknowledge  that 
it  was  an  evil  spirit  which  drove  him  to  take  more  than  the  equi- 
valent ;  but  it  is  in  vain  to  urge  him  farther ;  I  believe  it  is  not 
right  to  urge  him  farther ;  it  is  tasking  his  conscience  to  a  work 
for  which  it  is  not  prepared  ;  it  is  making  him  doubt  the  reality  of 
its  testimony,  so  far  as  it  goes.    And  why  is  this  1    Why  is  a  man 
who  really  approaches  his  brother's  soul  with  fear  and  trembling, 
knowing  what  an  awful  thing  it  is ;  knowing  how  wicked  it  is  to 
displace  one  true,  sound  conviction  in  it;  knowing  that  most  ten- 
derness is  necessary  where  the  good  is  weakest,  least  guarded, 
most  surrounded  with  contradictory  elements, — why  is  such  a  man 
careful  of  impairing  or  destroying  this  idea  of  adjustment  and  re- 
tribution in  the  heart  of  a  savage  ?    Because  he  believes  that 
every  transgression  does  and  must  receive  its  just  recompense  of 
reward ;  because  the  absence  of  all  sense  of  this  truth  in  the  savage 
mind,  would  indicate  the  absence  of  all  feeling  of  a  law ;  because 
the  presence  of  it  may  be  the  means  of  leading  him  on  to  the  ac- 
knowledgment of  his  own  subjection  to  law.    It  is  then,  I  conceive, 
the  very  essence  of  a  lawgiver's  duty  to  take  this  principle  of  God's 
government,  which  each  man  is  feeling  after  and  clutching  at,  and 
making  the  excuse  for  acts  of  violence,  (acts  that  keep  alive,  aggra- 
vate, and  harden  into  a  habit,  the  inward  hatred  which  conspired 
with  this  right  feeling  to  produce  them,) — to  take  this  principle, 
I  say,  and  make  it  the  rule  of  his  own  proceedings,  and  by  strictly 
enforcing  it,  lead  men  to  feel  that  there  is  a  power  ruling  over  them, 
which  redresses  the  wrong  that  each  has  so  impotently  and  mis- 
chievously endeavoured  to  redress  for  himself.    It  is  the  business  of 


THE  QUAKER. 


457 


the  lawgiver  to  say,  "  You  are  all  members  of  one  body ;  the  law 
cares  for  each  of  you  distinctly ;  it  feels  every  wrong  inflicted 
upon  every  one  of  you  as  a  wrong  to  itself;  it  will  require  from 
every  man  who  injures  another  man,  that  he  shall  make  compen- 
sation and  satisfaction  for  that  evil  which  he  has  done.  It  proposes 
to  itself  this  end,  and  will  endeavour,  as  far  it  can,  to  reach  it, — 
of  making  every  wrong  doer  feel  that  he  suffers  in  that  kind,  and 
to  that  degree,  in  which  he  has  offended. 

I  maintain,  then,  that  the  principle,  "  an  eye  for  an  eye,  a 
tooth  for  a  tooth,"  is  a  principle  which  lies  at  the  foundation  of  a 
State,  and  perhaps  more  than  any  other,  explains  to  us  what  a 
State  is.  It  is  a  righteous  principle,  I  had  almost  called  it  the 
righteous  principle  ;  for  it  is  that  which  presents  to  us  the  most 
complete  image  of  the  order  and  moral  government  of  the  world ; 
it  most  exhibits  the  rights  of  each  distinct  person,  in  connexion 
with  that  order  and  government.  Vengeance  must  be  somewhere 
— u  It  is  mine,  saith  the  Lord  ;"  and  the  State  is  that  which  teaches 
each  man  that  there  is  a  Lord,  an  invisible  ruler,  and  judge,  and 
governor  over  him,  whose  authority  he  is  bound  to  acknowledge, 
and  upon  whose  authority  every  act  of  private  vengeance  is  an  in- 
fringement. 

Thus  much  the  law  can  do,  and,  what  is  more,  nothing  but  a 
law  can  do  it.  No  spiritual  principle,  acting  upon  the  life  of  man, 
reforming  and  regenerating  his  heart  and  will,  can  bear  this  wit- 
ness for  a  God  who  punishes  wrong  doing,  can  bring  men  into  an 
apprehension  of  the  system  of  retribution  which  is  established  in 
the  universe.  If  we  have  not  a  power  distinctly  standing  out  and 
saying,  "  An  eye  for  an  eye,  and  a  tooth  for  a  tooth,"  "  as  you 
have  done  so  shall  it  be  rendered  to  you  again," — distinctly 
standing  out,  I  say,  and  embodying  this  principle  in  acts  of  regu- 
lar, anticipated,  proportionate  punishment,  there  is  nothing  in  the 
secret  operations  for  moulding  the  character  of  a  man  into  the  Di- 
vine image,  to  suggest  the  belief  that  man  is  actually  subjected  to 
such  a  Divine  government.  When  these  operations  are  exclu- 
sively regarded,  all  feelings  respecting  God  are  absorbed  into  the 
one,  that  He  is  the  renewer  and  sanctifier  of  our  lives ;  the  belief 
of  Him  as  a  judge,  which  is  in  fact  the  belief  of  his  personality,  is  in 
hazard  of  being  lost  altogether.    On  the  other  hand,  it  is  equally 


458 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


certain,  that  this  law,  with  its  scale  of  retributions,  cannot  ap- 
proach the  heart  and  spirit  of  any  man,  cannot  go  one  step  to- 
wards producing  that  tone  of  feeling,  which  yet  it  shows  to  be 
most  necessary.  The  law  may  say  to  a  man,"  Vengeance  is  mine, 
vengeance  is  the  Lord's ;  all  acts  of  individual  vengeance  shall  be 
themselves  accounted  crimes  it  may  even  do  much  to  convince  a 
man  that  his  private  fury  is  a  very  inconvenient  thing  for  himself 
as  well  as  his  neighbour, — that  it  is  a  monstrous  outrage  upon  the 
order  of  society ;  but  it  can  do  nothing  towards  taking  the  princi- 
ple and  desire  of  vengeance  out  of  man.  It  cannot  make  cheerful 
citizens,  with  minds  recognising  its  righteousness  and  delighting 
therein  ; — it  cannot  even  provide  against  the  outbreaks  which  the 
will  of  man,  rising  superior  to  the  rules  of  his  understanding,  is 
continually  producing.  To  hinder  these,  it  must  resort  to  some  spirit- 
ual influence,  and  this  spiritual  influence  may  be  of  three  kinds  : — 
It  may  be  mere  discipline  such  as  was  adopted  in  Sparta;  disci- 
pline excluding  education,  compelling  all  the  faculties  and  ener- 
gies of  the  spirit  into  one  direction,  making  them  consciously  feeble 
and  helpless  when  they  venture  into  any  other.  It  may  be  an  edu- 
cation of  the  calculating  faculty  merely,  a  skilful  experiment  to  de- 
stroy every  thought  and  feeling  which  interferes  with  the  hope  of 
direct  and  tangible  advantages ;  but  this  experiment  is  possible 
only  in  a  thoroughly  enervated  age,  and  possibly  then  only  for  a 
short  time.  Lastly,  it  may  be  that  kind  of  spiritual  influence 
which  acts  directly  upon  the  will,  which  despoils  it  of  its  selfishness, 
which  conforms  it  to  the  perfect  will  of  God.  To  employ  this  in- 
fluence, the  lawgiver  must  seek  the  aid  of  Him  who  said, "  Resist 
not  the  evil "  if  any  man  will  take  thy  cloak,  let  him  have  thy 
coat  also  f9  and  who,  in  saying  these  words,  showed  that  "  He 
was  not  come  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil  the  law" — "  an  eye  for  an 
eye,  a  tooth  for  a  tooth." 

Thus,  then,  we  come  back  upon  our  old  doctrine.  I  say  that 
the  law  protests  against  the  selfish,  individual  principle,  and  raises 
a  standard  against  it ;  and  I  say  that  the  Gospel  comes  to  exter- 
minate that  same  selfish  principle  out  of  the  mind  and  heart  of  the 
man.  Upon  the  same  ground,  therefore,  that  I  hold  tribunals  for 
the  rectification  of  social  evils  to  be  of  godlike  institution,  and  to 
carry  Divine  authority  with  them,  I  hold  the  principle  to  be  god- 


THE  QUAKER. 


459 


like,  and  carrying  Divine  authority,  "  that  whosoever  shall  smite 
thee  on  thy  right  cheek,  thou  shalt  turn  to  him  the  other  also." 
The  most  patient  endurance  of  private  wrongs  and  indignities,  the 
most  entire  willingness  to  abstain  from  any  acts  of  recrimination, 
or  even  of  self-justification,  are  parts  of  the  Christian  character, 
after  which,  I  conceive,  every  Christian  should  seek,  and  without 
which  he  should  feel  that  his  profession  is  maimed  and  imperfect, 
that  he  is  not  acting  out  the  idea  of  his  baptism.  No  toleration  of 
selfishness  in  himself  will  he  for  one  moment  plead  for,  but  be 
most  anxious  that  all  indications  of  it  in  him  should  be  detected 
and  exposed,  in  order  that  the  thing  itself  may  be  exterminated. 
He  has  no  fear  of  carrying  out  our  Lord's  commands  too  far,  and 
thus  sacrificing  his  civil  duties  to  his  Christian.  The  law  will  not 
thank  him  the  least  for  being  litigious ;  he  does  not  confirm  its  au- 
thority by  turning  it  to  his  private  advantage  ;  but  just  sO  far  as  he 
communicates  any  portion  of  his  spirit  to  the  world,  (and  he  knows 
that  the  higher  his  standard  and  his  practice  are,  the  more  of  that 
spirit  he  shall  communicate,)  so  much  better  will  the  law  be  ob- 
served, with  so  much  more  of  cheerful  reverence  will  all  its  subjects 
behold  it.  Observe,  however,  it  is  a  principle  to  which  he  is  bind- 
ing himself,  not  a  rule.  He  determines,  by  God's  help,  that  he  will 
never  resist  evil  for  a  selfish  [purpose,  because  he  knows  this  to  be 
our  Lord's  meaning.  He  does  not  say  that  he  will  not  resist  evil ; 
for  if  he  did,  he  would  say  that  he  would  not  be  like  his  Lord,  whose 
whole  life  on  earth,  and  whose  whole  life  in  his  members,  is  a  con- 
stant resistance  to  evil.  He  determines  not  to  go  to  law  to  avenge 
himself,  or  get  himself  profit :  he  does  not  determine  that  he  will 
not  go  to  law,  if  the  dignity  of  law  be  assailed  by  some  illegal 
power.  It  is  most  mischievous  to  think,  that  there  can  be  the 
least  departure  from  a  great  principle  of  morality  ;  it  is  most  ridicu- 
lous to  affirm,  that  the  most  opposite  methods  may  not  at  times  be 
necessary  to  uphold  that  principle.  When  Hampden  resisted  ship- 
money,  I  think  he  complied  far  better  with  our  Lord's  precept  than 
if  he  had  paid  the  tax  ;  for  he  was  sacrificing  his  own  interest  for 
the  sake  of  the  dignity  of  law,  not  using  the  lawT  for  the  promo- 
tion of  his  own  interest.  The  conscience  of  mankind  recognises  the 
distinction,  (in  cases  where  private  interests  do  not  interfere,)  as 
most  broad  and  palpable ;  and  the  conscience  of  each  man,  guided 


460 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


by  the  Spirit  of  God,  and  seeking  light  from  the  Word  of  God,  will 
be  able  to  carry  it  out  into  daily  practice,  when  private  interests  do 
interfere.  Thus  we  allege  this  case  also  as  an  illustration  of  our 
Lord's  fundamental  proposition,  that  he  does  not  destroy  but  fulfil. 

9.  There  is  one  remark  wThich  I  would  make  as  introductory  to 
our  consideration  of  the  next  passage,  the  last  which  concerns  our 
present  subject.  It  is,  that  the  whole  argument  against  war,  so  far 
as  it  is  gathered  from  this  Sermon,  or,  I  might  add,  from  the  New 
Testament,  must  turn  upon  it.  After  what  I  have  just  said,  it  is  ob- 
vious that  no  attempt  to  extract  a  condemnation  of  war,  or  any  al- 
lusion to  it  from  the  words,  "  Resist  not  evil,"  "  He  that  smiteth 
you  on  one  cheek,"  &c.,  can  be  successful.  The  application  of  the 
new  doctrine  must  be  determined  by  the  application  of  the  old ;  if 
the  "  eye  for  an  eye,  and  tooth  for  a  tooth,"  refers  to  judicial  pro- 
ceedings, the  words,  be  they  of  repeal,  or  of  confirmation,  must 
point  in  the  same  direction ;  and  it  is  most  manifest  torturing  of 
their  letter,  and  a  gross  perversion  of  their  spirit,  to  connect  them 
wTith  another  class  of  cases,  which  our  Lord  has  himself  treated  of 
distinctly.  Let  it  be  clearly  understood  then,  that  the  words  on 
which  the  question  turns  are  these : — "  It  hath  been  said  by  them 
of  old  time,  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbour  and  hate  thine  enemy : 
but  I  say  unto  you,  Love  your  enemies ;  bless  them  that  curse  you, 
pray  for  them  that  despitefully  use  you  and  persecute  you,  that  ye 
may  be  the  children  of  your  Father  in  heaven ;  for  he  maketh  his 
sun  to  rise  upon  the  evil  and  the  good,  and  sendeth  rain  on  the  just 
and  on  the  unjust.  For  if  ye  love  them  which  love  you,  what  re- 
ward have  ye  ?    Do  not  even  the  publicans  the  same  ?" 

There  is  one  other  observation  that  may  also  be  necessary  for 
the  satisfactory  examination  of  the  question.  The  words  which  our 
Lord  attributes  to  the  men  of  old  time,  do  not  appear,  totidem  Uteris, 
in  the  Old  Testament  scripture.  Hence  it  has  been  urged,  that  in 
this  particular  passage  a  traditional  maxim  of  the  Scribes — a  gloss, 
probably,  on  some  text  in  the  books  of  Moses — may  be  denounced, 
and  not  a  dogma  carrying  with  it  the  authority  of  inspiration.  I 
must  think  that  the  commentator  who  can  deliberately  avail  him- 
self of  this  subterfuge,  has  not  yet  learned  that  honesty  and  plain 
dealing  are  as  much  required  in  criticism  as  in  the  affairs  of  com- 
mon life.    He  does  not  find  the  words  in  any  text  of  the  Bible. 


THE  QUAKER. 


461 


Does  he  not  find  the  meaning  in  a  hundred  ?  Can  he  read  the  five 
books  of  Moses,  the  Kings  and  Chronicles,  above  all,  the  Psalms, 
and  say  that  if  a  Scribe  invented  this  phrase,  he  did  not  very  hap- 
pily embody  in  it  the  feeling  of  the  old  time,  or  that  our  Lord  does 
not  evidently  sanction  his  representation  of  it  ? 

But,  leaving  this  phrase  for  the  present,  let  us  observe  the  ground 
on  which  our  Lord  bases  his  new  precept.    "  That  ye  may  be  the 
children  of  your  Father  in  heaven,  for  he  causes  his  sun  to  shine 
upon  the  good  and  the  evil,  and  sendeth  his  rain  upon  the  just  and 
the  unjust."   Here  we  perceive  at  once  the  whole  principle  of  God's 
dispensations.    To  restore  the  Divine  image  in  man  is  the  end  of 
these,  and  therefore  every  precept  or  command  to  man  is  connected 
with  a  revelation  of  something  in  the  character  of  God.    He  is  not 
required  to  exhibit  any  qualities  in  himself  which  have  not  first  been 
presented  to  him  in  their  original  and  archetype.    This  doctrine 
being  assumed,  we  may  deduce  two  or  three  corollaries  from  it. 
First,  we  see  that  a  precept  of  universal  love  to  men,  and  especially 
of  love  to  them  in  their  character  as  sinners,  could  not  be  delivered 
except  in  the  way  of  hint  and  preparation,  till  there  had  been  that 
complete  manifestation  of  God  in  the  person  of  his  incarnate  and 
dying  Son,  as  connected  with  all  men,  feeling  for  men  in  their  pre- 
sent condition,  caring  for  the  most  vile  and  abject.    Secondly,  that 
every  previous  duty  imposed  upon  men,  as  a  test  of  their  faithful- 
ness and  obedience,  must  have  corresponded  to  something  in  the 
character  of  God  which  had  been  made  known  to  them.  Thirdly, 
that  since  these  two  revelations  of  God's  character  cannot  contradict 
each  other,  since  the  qualities  attributed  to  Him  must  in  some  sense 
or  other  be  compatible,  the  corresponding  duties  required  in  men 
cannot  be  contradictory,  must  in  some  sense  or  other  be  compatible. 
Fourthly,  that  unless  one  of  these  revelations  of  God  can  be  shown 
to  merge  in  the  other,  so  that  all  the  qualities  attributed  to  Him  in 
the  first  shall  be  actually,  if  not  apparently,  contained  in  the  second, 
the  duties  founded  upon  these  separate  revelations  cannot  be  merged 
in  each  other,  but  must  continue  distinct  obligations.    A  very  few 
words  will  be  sufficient  to  illustrate  each  of  these  points,  and  show 
you  their  application  to  the  subject  in  hand.    In  the  first,  it  is  dis- 
tinctly admitted  that  Christ  came  to  establish  a  universal  dispensa- 
tion, which  did  not  exist  previously ;  that  this  dispensation  is  ground- 

30 


462 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


ed  upon  a  manifestation  of  God  as  absolute,  universal  love ;  upon 
the  fact  that  he  has  entered  into  relations  in  the  person  of  his  Son 
with  man  as  he  is,  and  that  to  men  so  united  to  his  Son,  He  gives 
his  Spirit,  that  they  may  be  endowed  with  that  same  universal  love 
which  is  his  own  essential  nature,  and  which  has  been  displayed  in 
the  acts  and  sufferings  of  a  real  man.  This  revelation  and  this  com- 
mand lie  at  the  foundation  of  the  Christian  Church ;  this  is  express- 
ed in  our  baptism  "  into  the  name  of  the  Father,  and  of  the  Son,  and 
of  the  Holy  Ghost."  They  who  enter  into  this  state  are  bound  to 
love  their  enemies,  are  bound  to  love  all  men,  because  they  see  that 
God  loves  all ;  they  love  those  who  hate  and  persecute  them,  be- 
cause for  these  enemies  and  persecutors  Christ  died.  They  love 
even  the  enemies  of  God,  because  they  regard  them  as  creatures 
still  bearing  the  flesh  which  Christ  bore — not  yet  finally  separated 
from  Him,  not  deserted  by  his  Spirit.  They  keep  the  command 
given  in  his  Sermon  on  the  Mount  strictly,  fully,  spiritually,  for  the 
reason  which  the  Lawgiver  himself  lays  down,  because  they  "are 
the  children  of  their  Father  in  heaven." 

Our  second  corollary  affirms,  that  every  duty  enforced  upon  the 
Jews  as  a  proof  of  their  zeal  and  faithfulness  was  grounded  upon 
some  declaration  of  the  character  of  God.  God  is  declared  to  be 
the  King  over  the  Israelites,  to  watch  over  them,  to  care  for  them 
as  a  father  careth  for  his  children.  They  are  his  chosen  nation,  his 
appointed  witnesses;  therefore  they  are  to  care  for  each  other.  They 
are  to  feel  themselves  members  of  a  nation  distinct  from  other  na- 
tions ;  they  are  to  feel  for  each  other  as  they  do  not  feel  for  other 
men ;  for  they  are  called  to  a  distinct  office,  they  have  a  distinct 
position,  which  it  is  a  sin  for  them  not  to  maintain — "they  are  to 
love  their  neighbours."  Again,  God  is  revealed  to  them  as  carry- 
ing on  a  war  against  evil  in  the  world,  and  upholding  the  law  and 
order  which  He  has  established.  In  performing  this  work,  He  sends 
judgments  upon  nations,  sweeping  away  by  pestilence  and  famine 
whole  multitudes;  vindicating  the  truth  and  order,  which  are  the 
only  happiness  of  mankind,  at  the  expense  of  the  lives  of  individual 
men.  He  requires  of  his  chosen  people  that  they  should  feel  as  He 
feels ;  that  they  should  hate  violations  of  law  and  order  as  He  hates 
them ;  that  they  should  be  ready  to  be  the  executors  of  his  purpo- 
ses ;  to  maintain  the  principles  of  order  and  truth ;  to  be  avenged 


THE  QUAKER. 


463 


of  those  who  violate  them  ;  not  to  scruple  the  sacrifice  of  individual 
life,  sacred  and  awful  as  it  is,  for  the  sake  of  maintaining  that, 
without  which  life  is  a  mere  miserable  lie.  They  are  to  look  upon 
their  nation  as  established  for  this  very  end ;  to  be  a  witness  against 
evil ;  to  carry  on  a  warfare  within  and  without  against  those  who 
break  down  landmarks,  set  up  might  against  right,  turn  the  world 
into  a  wilderness,  denying  righteousness,  denying  God.  It  was  not 
always  to  be  fighting ;  its  witness  was  oftentimes  to  be  a  silent  one; 
but  there  were  occasions  when  it  was  to  draw  the  sword  and  fling 
away  the  scabbard ;  at  all  times  it  was  to  maintain  its  own  God- 
given  position;  it  was  to  resist  the  invaders  of  the  land  until  the 
death,  unless,  a  time  should  come  in  its  history,  an  awful  time,  such 
as  did  actually  arrive  in  the  days  of  the  prophet  Jeremiah — when 
it  was  a  witness  for  God  no  longer — when  to  resist  the  invader  was 
merely  to  assert  the  continuance  of  a  self-willed  power,  which  had 
thrown  off  the  Divine  yoke — when  allegiance  was  dissolved,  society 
at  an  end — when  it  was  a  duty  in  each  man  to  surrender,  that  he 
might  have  his  life  for  a  prey.  But  so  long  as  the  nation  was  a 
nation,  so  long  as  it  owned  God  and  God  owned  it,  the  maxim, 
"  Thou  shalt  hate  thine  enemy,"  expressed  a  duty  as  real,  as  bind- 
ing as  the  other  to  which  it  was  appended,  "Thou  shalt  love  thy 
neighbour." 

Our  third  corollary  affirms,  that  the  revelation  of  God  as  uni- 
versal love  is  not  inconsistent  with  that  prior  revelation  of  Him, 
as  the  Being  who  is  carrying  on  continual  strife  with  whatever  in 
our  world  resists  and  opposes  law  and  order ;  and  that,  conse- 
quently, the  duty  of  loving  our  enemies,  which  is  grounded  upon 
the  one  revelation,  must  be  in  some  way  or  other  compatible  with 
that  duty  of  hating  our  enemies,  which  is  grounded  upon  the  other. 
Only  think  to  what  the  idea  of  a  Being  of  perfect  love  must  reduce 
itself— to  what  it  has  actually  reduced  itself — when  men  have  con- 
templated these  two  Divine  attributes  as  contrary  to  each  other. 
"What  does  love  become,  but  a  weak,  contemptible  tolerance  of 
that  which  is  unlovely,  a  merciless  mercy,  which  now  and  for  ever 
*  can  permit  the  creatures  it  has  formed  to  be  as  sinful,  that  is  to  say 
as  miserable,  as  they  will  ?  Does  not  every  man's  conscience  ve- 
hemently resist  the  decree  of  his  carnal  understanding,  that  there 
is  any  strife  between  the  idea  of  a  law  of  love  and  a  Being  who  is 


464 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


determined  to  carry  that  law  into  execution  ?  Does  not  he  feel, 
that  if  he  parted  with  either  side  or  aspect  of  the  character,  the 
other  would  straightway  become  practically  unintelligible  ?  Well, 
and  is  it  not  the  same,  must  it  not  be  the  same,  with  our  judgments 
of  ourselves  and  our  fellow  creatures  ?  Do  we  not  feel,  that  that 
man's  love  of  good  is  a  very  paltry  thing,  which  is  not  accompa- 
nied with  a  hatred  of  evil?  And  do  we  not  feel  that  hatred  of  evil 
is  a  mere  name,  if  it  is  not  willing  to  go  forth  in  acts  for  resisting 
and  extinguishing  evil  ?  And  do  we  not  feel,  that  that  man  has  a 
very  poor  love  of  his  kind,  and  of  each  individual  man  as  a  member 
of  that  kind,  who  does  not  regard  as  his  enemies  those  who  hinder 
the  good  and  help  forward  the  evil,  and  who  does  not,  in  that  cha- 
racter and  capacity,  hate  them  ?  These  are  no  sophistical  refine- 
ments ;  they  are  the  common,  honest  judgments  of  mankind,  tri- 
umphing over  sophistical  refinement,  getting  through  the  mere  re- 
semblances of  names  and  words  into  the  essential  resemblances  of 
things,  and  thus  even  unconsciously  justifying  the  ways  of  God, 
and  asserting  the  harmony  of  his  dispensations. 

Our  fourth  position  affirms,  that  unless  the  view  of  the  charac- 
ter of  God  presented  by  the  Jewish  economy  be  comprehended  in 
that  view  which  is  presented  by  Christ  in  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount,  the  duties  required  of  the  Jew  remain  binding  on  the  Chris- 
tian, and  are  not  swallowed  up  in  the  duties  specially  and  charac- 
teristically appertaining  to  him  as  the  heir  of  the  New  Covenant. 
Our  Lord  says,  "  Love  your  enemies,  for  your  Father  in  heaven 
causes  his  sun  to  shine  upon  the  good  and  the  evil,  and  sendeth  his 
rain  upon  the  just  and  the  unjust."  Here  is  a  fact  of  his  providence 
introduced  as  an  illustration  of  his  character.  But  there  are  other 
facts  of  his  providence  existing  side  by  side  with  this,  not  interfering 
with  it.  He  who  gives  rain  and  sunshine,  sends  also  plagues  and 
pestilences.  These  come  not,  indeed,  to  distinguish  between  indi- 
viduals, not  to  determine  which  are  good,  which  evil ;  but  yet, 
certainly,  for  discipline  ;  certainly  to  teach  the  nations  the  effects 
of  indolence,  intemperance,  sensuality;  certainly  to  lead  them 
gradually  to  distinguish  truth  from  falsehood,  the  good  from  the  evil.  • 
If,  then,  these  facts  exist  together,  and  exist  as  distinct  signs  of  dis- 
tinct though  perfectly  harmonious  purposes  in  the  Divine  mind, 
men,  who  are  meant  to  be  the  images  of  God,  should  have  some 


THE  QUAKER. 


465 


way  of  distinctly  expressing  each  in  their  own  minds  and  proce- 
dure. Christ  comes  to  bring  men  into  closer  connexion  with  God, 
to  endow  them  with  the  power  of  completely  fulfilling  his  will,  to 
make  them  complete  vicegerents  in  executing  his  purposes  towards 
the  world.  Surely  He  does  not  come  to  depose  them  from  the 
office  of  executing  any  part  of  the  work  to  which  He  once  called 
them  ;  surely,  if  He  does  not  cease  to  judge  and  to  punish,  because 
He  admits  all  into  his  kingdom  of  love,  neither  can  it  be  meant 
that  they  should  cease  to  judge  and  punish  under  Him,  because  He 
has  appointed  them  under  Him  to  publish  his  Gospel,  and  open  the 
doors  of  his  kingdom.  And  the  only  remaining  question  is,  How 
can  both  these  forms  of  character  be  at  once  preserved  ?  How- 
can  these  two  sets  of  duties,  apparently  so  opposite,  be  fulfilled  ? 
Clearly,  there  is  the  greatest  danger  in  omitting  either ;  there  is 
the  greatest  danger  in  confusing  them.  What  weak,  ineffectual 
lovers  we  are,  when  love  is  separated  from  law,  we  have  hinted 
at  already  ;  what  monstrous  perverters  of  the  Divine  law  when 
we  set  up  law  against  love,  it  requires  no  words  to  explain.  But, 
do  we  fare  much  better  if  we  try  to  keep  up  a  balancing  system  in  our 
minds  ?  Not  too  much  love,  lest  you  should  grow  lax — not  too 
much  law,  lest  you  should  become  cruel.  Will  this  kind  of  see- 
saw satisfy  any  man  who  wishes  to  be  honest  to  himself  and  his 
fellowT-creatures  ?  Not  too  much  love  !  How  can  there  be  too 
much,  if  dying  for  love  was  not  too  much  ?  Not  too  much  law  ! 
How  can  there  be  too  much,  if  the  destruction  of  cities  and  em- 
pires, yea,  of  a  world  for  the  sake  of  it,  was  not  too  much  ?  Then, 
I  say,  if  it  be  so,  there  must  be  some  distinct,  Divine  scheme  for 
asserting  the  dignity  and  glory  of  each  ;  for  upholding  love  in  its 
fulness  lest  law  should  perish  ;  for  upholding  law  in  its  fulness  lest 
love  should  perish.  By  acting  in  concert  with  each  of  them,  a 
man  shall  find  that  the  feeling  of  God's  universal  love  in  himself 
does  not  clash  with  the  feeling  of  God's  eternal  and  unchangeable 
law ;  that  his  perception  of  his  own  duties,  inward  and  external, 
and  of  the  perfect  compatibleness  of  those  which  seem  most  oppos- 
ed, waxes  clearer  and  clearer  ;  and,  by  refusing  to  act  in  concert 
with  each  of  these  schemes,  he  shall  find  one  set  of  duties  continu- 
ally interfering  with  another — the  peculiar  temper  of  his  mind  de- 
termining which  he  shall  prefer,  which  neglect.    The  words,  then, 


466 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


"  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbour  and  hate  thine  enemy,"  are  not 
destroyed  but  fulfilled  by  the  words,  "  Love  your  enemies,  bless 
them  that  curse  you." 

The  reasons  of  my  difference  with  the  Quaker,  I  hope,  are  now 
sufficiently  explained.  I  do  not  contend  for  any  abatement  in  the 
strictness  of  his  views,  I  only  want  them  to  be  less  narrow.  I  do 
not  wish  him  to  have  a  less  spiritual  conception  of  Christian  mo- 
rality, I  want  him  not  practically  to  exhaust  it  of  its  spirit  by  de- 
priving it  of  its  body.  Above  all,  I  want  him  to  perceive  that  the 
scheme  which  he  has  set  up  in  the  world  for  the  purpose  of  estab- 
lishing peace  and  charity  in  it,  is  a  far  less  effectual  one  than  the 
scheme  which  God  has  set  up  in  it  for  the  same  end.  The  Qua- 
ker's society  has  contained  self-denying  and  brave  men,  who  have 
borne  witness  for  the  truth,  that  we  are  not  to  resist  evil,  but  when 
we  are  smitten  on  one  cheek  to  turn  the  other  also.  Such  men 
must  have  done  good.  Every  one  who  lets  the  world  see  that 
selfishness  is  not  his  law,  that  he  can  obey  a  principle,  that  the 
arm  of  God  is  more  to  be  trusted  than  the  arm  of  flesh,  will  cer- 
tainly do  good.  But  there  is  nothing  to  hinder  the  Catholic  Church 
from  bearing  such  testimonies,  many  in  all  ages  have  borne  them. 
It  is  the  other  kind  of  Quaker  testimony — his  negative  testimony, 
which  seems  to  me  of  no  worth  at  all,  except  so  far  as  it  may  obtain 
some  worth  from  its  mixture  with  the  acts  I  have  just  spoken  of, 
nay,  which  in  itself  is  seriously  mischievous.  There  is  much  in  the 
worst  feelings  of  men,  especially  in  our  day,  which  sympathizes 
with  the  Quaker  language  respecting  war  and  punishments. 
There  is  a  cowardly  shrinking  from  mere  physical  suffering,  a 
great  disposition  to  talk  about  the  expensiveness  of  national  honour, 
because  money  is  a  visible,  honour  an  invisible  thing  ;  there  is  an 
unreasonable,  uncharitable,  and  superstitious  notion,  that  a  soldier, 
so  far  as  his  profession  is  concerned,  is  of  this  world,  and  that  a 
man  who  dies  on  the  field  of  battle  is  necessarily  less  prepared  for 
his  change  than  one  who  dies  in  his  bed.  All  these  feelings, 
which  have  tended  sadly  to  degrade  and  impoverish  the  mind  of 
modern  Europe,  to  cultivate  the  trade  temper,  to  make  armies  what 
they  are  told  they  must  be,  and  therefore  to  make  them  dangerous 
by  depriving  them  of  any  high  restraining  principle,  have  been 
greatly  encouraged  by  the  tone  which  religious  men  of  our  day 


THE  QUAKER. 


467 


have  adopted  from  the  Quakers.  What  is  such  language  doing 
for  the  promotion  of  permanent  and  universal  peace  ?  It  is  the 
greatest  hinderance  to  any  high  understanding  of  the  words,  to  any 
hopeful  expectation  of  the  thing.  For  whoever  translates  the  holy 
name  1  Peace'  by  carnal  security  or  luxurious  ease,  desecrates  it, 
and  makes  every  scriptural  application  of  it  unmeaning.  Whoever 
teaches  civilians  to  love  their  pelf  above  all  things,  or  military 
men  to  believe  that  they  have  no  vocation  but  a  murderous  one, 
helps  to  make  the  one  so  weak  that  they  must  be  ready  to  quail 
before  any  physical  force,  the  other  so  wicked  that  they  must  be 
ready  to  exert  it.  And  the  loss  of  all  national  spirit  will  lead,  as 
it  has  ever  done,  not  to  a  golden  age  of  Christian  fraternization,  but  to 
a  military  despotism.  Far  otherwise,  as  we  have  seen  already,  has 
the  Church  of  Christ  worked  in  the  world.  It  has  been  the  instru- 
ment of  putting  down  military  despotism,  the  instrument  of  evoking 
national  feeling.  The  sins  of  its  ministers  leading  them  to  exalt 
their  own  position  and  to  make  it  extra-national,  the  sins  of  the 
national  rulers,  in  seeking  to  put  down  that  spiritual  power  within 
it  which  seemed  to  interfere  with  their  projects,  have  thwarted  the 
gracious  design  of  Providence,  but  they  have  only  made  the  cha- 
racter of  that  design  more  evident.  They  have  shown  that  it  is  his 
will  to  establish  peace ;  first,  by  creating  in  the  heart  of  every  na- 
tion a  witness  of  what  the  true  order  and  universal  fellowship  of 
the  world  is ;  next,  by  using  the  society  which  embodies  this  fel- 
lowship as  an  instrument  for  cultivating  the  spirit  of  each  nation, 
for  awakening  each  to  the  perception  of  the  object  of  its  existence, 
for  destroying  in  each  the  motives  which  lead  to  strife  and  division, 
(the  worst  and  strongest  of  those  motives  being  the  trade  temper;) 
finally,  by  putting  into  the  hands  of  the  national  ruler  a  sword  for 
the  chastisement  of  those  who  love  war  rather  than  peace,  a 
sword  not  to  be  sheathed  or  to  growT  rusty  till  all  things  be  ful- 
filled. 

II.  It  remains  that  I  should  say  a  few  words  respecting  those 
objections  of  the  Quaker,  which  refer  to  a  national  provision  for 
Christian  ministers.  We  shall  derive  great  help  in  understanding 
this  subject,  from  the  remarks  which  have  been  already  made  in 
this  section.  We  have  found  that  there  are  two  societies,  both  or- 
ganic, both  forming  part  of  the  same  constitution ;  both  related  to 


468  THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 

man  under  different  aspects  of  his  life ;  both  bearing  witness  for 
God  according  to  different  aspects  of  his  character ;  the  one  ex- 
pressed in  such  institutions  as  Sacraments,  which  directly  concern 
man  as  a  spiritual  being,  the  other  in  such  institutions  as  Property, 
which  directly  concern  him  as  a  creature  of  this  earth.    We  have 
seen  that  the  first  and  higher  of  these  societies  has  been,  under  our 
dispensation,  that  which  has  called  the  lower  into  life.    Now  no- 
thing is  more  true  than  the  assertion  of  the  Quaker,  That  all  the 
provisions  made  for  ministers  of  the  Gospel  in  the  first  ages,  were 
made  by  the  love  of  their  flocks.    He  is  most  right  in  asserting 
that  this  was  so,  because  the  principle  of  the  Gospel  is  a  principle 
of  love,  because  the  power  of  the  Gospel  is  one  which  acts  imme- 
diately upon  the  spirit  and  the  will  of  man.    He  is  most  right  in 
asserting,  that  since  we  are  under  the  same  dispensation  of  love  as 
the  Apostles  were,  the  principles  which  governed  the  Church  then 
are  to  govern  it  now.    But  he  has  overlooked  one  point ;  he  has 
forgotten  that  love  is  not  a  thing  which  looks  at  to-day  or  to-mor- 
row, but  which  stretches  its  thoughts  into  the  future,  which  brings 
all  ages  together  in  its  embrace.    The  love  of  the  early  Church 
was  not  shown  to  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul  chiefly  for  their  own 
sakes,  but  as  stewards  of  the  mysteries  of  God,  as  the  representa- 
tives of  a  kingdom  of  which  there  was  to  be  no  end.  Therefore 
it  was  inevitable  that  this  charity  should  be  exercised  in  providing 
for  the  wants  of  the  time  to  come,  for  the  service  of  God  and  for 
the  benefit  of  men  in  generations  unborn.    I  ask  whether  this  far- 
looking  spirit  of  charity  be  not  more  indicative  of  a  dispensation, 
than  that  which  can  only  see  present  objects,  can  only  think  of  those 
to  whom  it  is  personally  obliged  ?    And  yet  it  is  this  charity  which 
is  the  foundation  of  all  the  complaints  of  Quakers,  against  the 
principle  of  an  ecclesiastical  property.    That  property  is  expressly 
a  fund  of  which  particular  men,  in  particular  ages,  are  merely  the 
stewards  ;  which  is  a  fund  for  all  ages. 

But  I  grant  that  whatever  may  have  been  the  origin  of  such  a 
fund,  it  is  a  most  dangerous  possession  for  any  body,  providing  the 
ends  for  which  it  exists  are  not  very  clearly  defined.  Now,  the 
effect  of  the  union  of  the  Church  with  the  nation  is  precisely  to 
define  these  objects,  to  make  the  property  which  is  bestowed  upon 
the  ecclesiastical  society  as  such,  available  for  certain  clear,  intel- 


THE  QUAKER. 


469 


ligible  purposes.  The  Church  establishes  itself  in  a  particular  dis- 
trict, sets  up  its  buildings,  carries  on  its  services  by  the  processes 
which  I  have  spoken  of  already  ;  the  people,  among  whom  it 
comes,  acquire  a  national  consistency,  begin  to  have  more  distinct 
notions  about  their  relation  to  each  other,  and  about  this  matter  of 
property.  What  they  do  with  reference  to  this  ecclesiastical  pro- 
perty, is  to  give  it  the  security  which  belongs  to  individual  proper- 
ty, and  by  different  arrangements  to  make  it  available  for  the 
education  of  the  nation  from  age  to  age.  What  further  they  do,  is 
to  exact  from  the  owners  of  the  soil  a  direct  acknowledgment  that 
their  own  property,  though  assured  to  them  individually,  is  a  trust 
from  God,  for  the  good  of  the  nation,  and  must  contribute  a  portion 
of  its  produce  to  the  general  fund.  This  is  the  simple  history  of 
Church  property,  and  of  its  connexion  with  national  property.  It 
was  increased  afterward  by  voluntary  gifts  and  bequests,  the  fruit 
in  many  cases  of  superstitious  influences,  but  of  influences  acting 
upon  the  will,  and  therefore  not  destroying  the  character  of  the 
benefaction.  On  the  other  hand,  the  influence  of  the  nation,  as 
every  body  knows,  was  exerted  in  the  middle  ages  to  prevent  this 
accumulation  of  wealth,  to  make  these  gifts  and  bequests  difficult 
or  ineffectual.  Nothing,  therefore,  can  be  a  greater  perversion  of 
history  than  to  speak  of  ecclesiastical  revenues,  as  if  they  were  the 
fruit  of  union  with  the  State.  The  State  has  been  a  great  instru- 
ment, in  God's  hands,  for  preventing  the  mischiefs  which  might 
have  accrued  to  the  Church,  and  which  did  accrue  to  it  at  different 
times,  from  its  influence  over  the  minds  of  men.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  has  been  a  great  instrument  in  pointing  out  to  the  Church 
the  purposes  for  which  its  wealth  has  been  given  it,  and  may  be 
most  profitably  exercised.  And  if  we  are  asked  to  show  what 
tokens  there  are  of  its  being  the  will  of  God,  that  a  fund  should 
exist  for  the  teaching  of  the  nation,  which  should  be  exempt  from 
the  assaults  of  individual  avarice,  and  which  should  not  be  diverted 
to  mere  selfish  uses,  I  will  mention  three. 

First,  the  shameful  inclination  which  the  clergy  have  often 
shown  to  turn  this  wealth  to  purposes  of  selfishness  and  luxury  ; 
the  witness  which  it  has  borne  against  that  sin,  the  strong  feeling 
and  conscience  in  men,  that  because  the  clergy  were  stewards  of 
this  property  selfishness  was  a  greater  sin  in  them  than  in  others, 


470 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


the  heavy  judgments  which  have  followed  upon  the  exhibition  of 
it.  Secondly,  the  greedy  disposition  which  the  nobles  and  gentry 
have  shown  to  plunder  this  property ;  the  proofs  they  have  given 
that  this  disposition  was  part  of  the  same  which  led  them  to  be 
careless  of  their  tenants  and  dependents,  to  live  lives  of  self-indul- 
gence, to  say,  '  The  soil  is  our  own,  who  is  Lord  over  us,'  the 
miserable  habits  which  they  have  cultivated  in  themselves  and 
transmitted  to  their  descendants,  whenever  there  has  not  been  such 
a  fixed  and  continual  testimony  as  Church  property  furnishes  against 
these  wicked  imaginations.  Lastly,  the  utter  incapacity  of  Qua- 
kers, with  all  their  charitable  tendencies,  acts,  and  protests,  to  con- 
vince the  world  that  they  do  not  estimate  wealth  far  above  its 
value;  that  they  do  not  look  upon  the  acquisition  of  it  as  the  main 
end  of  life.  I  do  not  say  the  impression  is  a  true  one ;  I  do  say 
that  a  society  which  exists  to  bear  a  testimony  against  that  which 
is  secular,  has  utterly  failed  in  making  mankind  understand  the 
testimony,  and  has  failed  precisely  because  it  has  treated  property 
as  a  thing  necessary  and  yet  evil ;  to  be  toiled  and  watched  for, 
and  yet  not  to  be  redeemed  from  temporary  and  servile  uses  for  the 
continual  service  of  God  and  man. 


section  II. 

THE  PURE    THE  OCR  ATI  ST. 

Under  this  name  I  comprehend  various  sets  of  men  differing 
from  each  other  in  many  respects,  but  all  distinguished  by  a  certain 
Jewish  spirit,  the  spirit  most  directly  opposed  to  that  of  the  Qua- 
kers. The  Scotch  Covenanter  is  one,  perhaps  the  most  remarka- 
ble, specimen  of  the  class.  The  Fifth-Monarchy  Man  exhibits  a 
very  different  modification  of  it.  Some  of  its  more  general  fea- 
tures may  be  traced  even  in  the  Nonjurors  of  the  17th  and  18th 
centuries,  who  regarded  the  puritan  factions  with  so  much  contempt 
and  horror.  It  has  reappeared  under  at  least  two  different  forms 
in  our  own  day.  On  the  whole  it  may  be  pronounced  rather  char- 
acteristic of  Great  Britain,  on  which  account  I  shall  be  the  more 
brief  in  my  notice  of  it  here. 

The  Theocratist  believes  as  I  do,  that  the  Old  Testament  is  the 


THE  PURE  THEOCRATIST. 


471 


great  key  to  the  meaning  of  national  society.  He  believes,  as  I 
do,  that  the  Lord  is  the  king  of  every  nation  as  much  as  He  was  of 
the  Jewish  nation.  He  thinks,  as  I  do,  that  a  nation  is  to  under- 
take wars,  to  administer  oaths,  to  inflict  punishments  in  the  name 
and  under  the  authority  of  its  unseen  Ruler.  From  these  premises 
he  proceeds  to  deduce  certain  inferences,  which  are  various,  accord- 
ing to  his  other  feelings  and  tempers  of  his  mind,  but  which  are 
all  apparently  sustained  by  the  same  scriptural  authority. 

The  Covenanter  says  that  the  Jew  existed  to  witness  against 
idolatry ;  for  the  putting  down  of  idolatry  he  was  to  unsheath  his 
sword.  The  modern  nation  exists  for  the  same  object,  and  is  to  use 
the  same  means  for  effecting  it.  By  its  obligation  and  oath  to  God 
it  is  bound  to  extirpate  all  forms  of  faith  which  are  either  idola- 
trous or  tend  to  idolatry. 

The  Fifth-Monarchy  Man  does  not  see  in  any  existing  nation 
the  pattern  of  a  theocracy.  But  one  is  on  the  point  of  being  es- 
tablished, one  which  shall  fulfil  the  prophecies  respecting  that  king- 
dom which  was  cut  out  of  the  mountain  without  hands.  He  is  not 
very  clear  whether  this  society  is  to  be  universal  or  national,  a 
Catholic  Church,  or  an  Ancient  Israel.  He  finds  some  of  the  fea- 
tures of  both  in  the  Bible,  and  he  strives  to  unite  them. 

The  Nonjuror  recognises  the  Church  and  the  nation  as  distinct, 
but  the  nation  exists  in  the  person  of  its  king,  for  the  purpose  of 
supporting  and  propagating  the  Church  and  putting  down  heresy. 
This  was  the  function  of  the  old  Jewish  King,  this  should  be  the 
function  of  the  king  now.  For  this  purpose  he  is  anointed  with 
oil,  his  person  is  sacred  ;  he  may  not  be  deposed  or  set  aside  for 
any  offences. 

After  what  I  have  said  in  my  remarks  upon  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount,  the  reader  may  perhaps  understand  my  main  point  of  differ- 
ence with  all  these  classes.  But  it  will  be  well  to  bring  it  out  in 
reference  to  each  side  of  the  doctrine.  The  Covenanter  has  surely 
the  strongest  warrant  for  his  assertion,  that  the  Jewish  Common- 
wealth was  in  all  its  parts  a  protest  against  idolatry,  that  the  mo- 
ment it  forgot  that  protest  it  virtually  ceased  to  exist.  And  I  think 
he  is  right  in  saying  that  every  nation  exists  under  the  condition 
of  its  bearing  this  protest.  Sensual  worship  is  its  destruction.  The 
acknowledgment  of  an  absolute  unseen  Being,  a  rigid  exclusion  of 


472  THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 

every  thing  which  tends  to  confound  him  with  the  works  of  his 
hands,  are  implied  in  the  very  nature  of  law,  and  are  the  only  terms 
upon  which  law  can  be  enforced. 

A  nation,  then,  must  by  all  means  strive  against  idolatry ;  but 
how  must  it  strive  ?  Under  a  national,  legal  dispensation,  where 
law  is  the  first  thing,  and  spiritual  principles  are  looked  upon  as  the 
support  of  law,  the  ordinary  means  which  a  nation  resorts  to  for  the 
punishment  of  other  offences,  must  be  resorted  to  for  the  punishment 
of  this.  Idolatry  and  all  forms  of  false  worship  must  be  crimes  to 
be  punished  by  the  state.  There  are  manifest  inconveniences  in 
such  a  course ;  but  it  is  inevitable,  the  existence  of  the  nation  de- 
pends upon  it.  Under  a  spiritual  dispensation  we  escape  from  this 
necessity ;  idolatry  is  raised  from  the  circle  of  outward  crimes  to  the 
circle  of  inward  sins  ;  the  sword  of  the  Lawgiver  is  felt  to  be  in- 
adequate to  reach  it;  the  sword  of  the  Spirit  is  known  to  be  more 
effectual ;  it  claims  this  as  part  of  its  province ;  it  leaves  to  the 
legislature  only  outward  crimes,  of  which  idolatry,  if  not  extirpated 
out  of  the  heart,  must  be  the  cause.  The  covenanting  doctrine, 
therefore,  that  because  the  Lord  is  our  King,  our  National  King, 
we  are  bound  to  treat  offences  directly  against  him  as  offences 
against  the  law,  is  applicable  only  to  a  State  existing  without  a 
Church.  Neither  the  honour  of  God  nor  the  safety  of  the  Nation 
binds  us  to  take  any  particular  method  for  avenging  the  one  or  pre- 
serving the  other ;  and  if  we  believe,  as  those  who  believe  in  a 
Church  must,  that  spiritual  methods  are  the  most  divine,  and  as 
readers  of  history  must,  that  they  are  the  most  effectual,  we  have 
no  excuse  for  following  Jewish  precedent  at  the  cost  of  sacrificing 
principles  which  are  implied  in  the  Old  Testament  and  expounded 
in  the  New. 

It  will  be  evident,  I  think,  from  these  considerations,  that  the 
Scotch  Covenanter  was  seeking  to  establish  a  Jewish  and  not  a 
Christian  nation  ;  that  is  to  say,  a  Nation  professing  Religion,  and 
not  a  nation  which  recognises  a  Church  as  the  ground  and  vital 
principle  of  its  own  existence. 

Of  the  Millennarians  I  will  only  say,  that  the  records  of  their 
thoughts  are  by  no  means  unworthy  of  study.  Their  confusions 
respecting  that  which  is  distinct  and  that  which  is  universal,  that 
which  is  spiritual  and  that  which  is  legal,  are  only  the  same  con- 


THE  PURE  THEOCRATIST. 


473 


fusions  concentrated  into  a  small  compass,  and  divested  of  restrain- 
ing and  correcting  influences,  which  we  find  scattered  through  all 
ecclesiastical  history.  And  in  the  writings  of  Sir  Harry  Vane,  if 
he  is  to  be  considered  one  of  them,  we  may  detect  very  deep  prin- 
ciples and  remarkable  distinctions  indeed,  which  need  only  the 
acknowledgment  that  they  were  embodied  ages  before  in  the 
Catholic  Church,  to  make  them  as  practically  important  as  they  are 
profound. 

It  will  seem  most  strange  that  I  should  impute  to  the  Nonjuror, 
who  is  usually  spoken  of  in  England  as  the  highest  of  high  church- 
men, the  same  legal,  anti-ecclesiastical  spirit  which  we  noticed  in 
the  Covenanter.  But  the  fact  seems  to  be  this :  he  conceived  the 
Church  to  be  little  more  than  the  Canon  Law  embodied  in  a  set  of 
persons  and  institutions.  This  law  he  set  very  much  above  the  na- 
tional law,  and  resisted  as  erastian  any  attempt  to  bring  one  under 
the  yoke  of  the  other.  But  of  the  Church,  as  a  spiritual,  sacra- 
mental body,  constituted  not  in  laws  but  in  a  person,  exhibiting  the 
principles  and  essence  of  laws,  and  therefore  not  to  be  circumscrib- 
ed by  their  formalities,  he  seems  to  have  had  little  idea.  How, 
therefore,  the  Nation  could  serve  the  Church,  except  by  propaga- 
ting its  opinions  and  putting  down  its  enemies ;  how  both  might 
be  employed  to  fulfil  the  purposes  of  Him  who  is  the  absolute  Love 
and  the  absolute  Righteousness,  towards  a  spiritual  creature  who  is 
dwelling  here  under  visible  and  earthly  conditions,  he  did  not  much 
consider.  And  it  would  seem  that  the  same  habit  of  mind  which 
must  have  so  much  obscured  the  New  Testament  to  him,  did  not 
help  him  greatly  in  his  interpretation  of  the  Old  ;  otherwise  he 
must  surely  have  perceived  that,  however  unlawful  it  may  be  for 
subjects  to  depose  kings,  the  King  of  kings  is  often  said  in  Scrip- 
ture to  exercise  his  own  prerogative  in  deposing  them.  And  if  we 
are  living  under  his  government,  as  the  Jews  were,  (which  is  their 
own  doctrine,)  we  must  have  a  right  to  inquire  whether  he  has,  on 
any  occasion,  exhibited  his  displeasure  against  any  monarch  who 
has  broken  a  national  covenant,  by  setting  him  aside,  and  by  ap- 
pointing another.  For  it  may  be,  that  in  refusing  our  allegiance 
to  that  ruler,  or  in  denying  that  he  is  rightful  as  well  as  actual 
king,  we  are  making  light,  not  of  the  privileges  of  subjects,  but  of 
the  authority  of  God. 


474 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


SECTION  III. 
THE  SEPARATIST. 

By  this  name  I  designate  those  who  say  that  the  nation  and 
Church  ought  to  be  separate  bodies,  while  yet  they  do  not,  with  the 
Quaker,  look  upon  national  life  as  an  evil  thing.  They  state  the 
reasons  for  their  opinion  thus  :  '  The  state  is  secular ;  the  Church, 
if  it  be  a  true  Church,  is  anti-secular ;  to  unite  a  secular  and  anti- 
secular  body  is  monstrous.  The  effects  of  it  are  an  invasion  of  the 
rights  of  conscience,  continual  disputes  between  the  two  societies, 
an  impossibility  of  reformation.'  These  are  the  doctrines  generally 
maintained  by  the  successors  of  those  English  puritans,  who  were 
themselves  such  vehement  assertors  of  the  religious  character  of 
the  State. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  reply  to  them  at  any  length.  I  have  ad- 
mitted their  premises  as  fully  as  they  can  desire.  A  secular  and  an 
anti-secular  society  can  exist  together  only  as  deadly  enemies.  If 
the  state  be  secular,  the  Church  must  desire  the  extinction  of  the 
state,  for  she  lives  that  she  may  destroy  that  which  is  secular.  Our 
difficulty  is  to  understand  how  Christian  men  can  speak  with  so 
much  toleration,  of  that  which  they  describe  by  an  epithet  so  purely 
evil.  For,  if  they  do  not  use  the  word  secular  in  an  evil  sense, 
where  lies  the  point  of  their  antithesis  ?  How  is  the  Church  anti- 
secular  except  as  she  is  opposed  to  something  wrong,  something 
ungodly  ?  If  by  the  word  anti-secular  is  understood  merely  spi- 
ritual as  opposed  to  legal,  then  the  whole  phrase  is  a  cheating  one. 
For  we  deny  that  there  is  any  contradiction  between  that  which  is 
lagal  and  that  which  is  spiritual ;  and  those  who  use  this  Ian- 
guage  will  join  us  in  the  denial.  They  say  continually,  that  the 
Law  and  the  Gospel  are  not  contrary  to  each  other,  though  the 
Gospel  is  able  to  do  that,  which  the  Law,  being  weak  through 
the  flesh,  cannot  do.  They  resist,  as  we  do,  the  doctrine  that  what 
is  evangelical  is  anti-legal,  while  they  assert  just  as  we  do,  that  it  is 
something  entirely  different  from  that  which  is  legal,  because  it  has 
an  inward  and  not  merely  a  literal  power.  "What  I  have  been 
endeavouring  to  maintain  is,  that  a  nation  just  so  far  as  it  is  a  nation, 


THE  SEPARATIST.  475 

is  anti-secular  in  one  way,  just  as  much  as  the  Church  is  anti- 
secular  in  another.  Both  are  God's  appointed  instruments  for  re- 
sisting the  evil,  rebellious,  disorderly  principles,  which  make  up  the 
scriptural  notion  of  '  this  world.'  Both  are  liable  to  invasions  of 
that  principle,  which  they  are  appointed  to  resist ;  both  have  been 
infected  with  it.  The  Church  has  become  secular  when  she  has 
attempted  to  realize  herself  as  a  separate  body;  the  Nation  has 
become  secular  when  it  has  tried  to  realize  itself  as  a  separate 
body.  But  each  does  so,  by  violating  the  law  of  its  existence,  by 
refusing  to  be  that  which  the  Scriptures  affirm  and  history  proves 
that  it  was  meant  to  be. 

After  what  I  said  under  the  last  head,  it  is  scarcely  necessary 
that  I  should  say  much  about  the  charge  of  this  union  being  un- 
favourable to  the  rights  of  conscience.  How  such  a  notion  has 
gained  prevalency  I  think  I  have  explained.  A  nation,  I  said,  if 
it  is  to  preserve  its  own  existence,  must  put  down  that  which  is  un- 
dermining it.  It  finds  that  principles  lead  to  acts,  that  notions 
about  the  Supreme  Being  lead  to  evil  conduct  towards  men  ; 
therefore  it  must  extirpate  those  principles  if  it  can.  Nations  in 
union  with  the  Church  have  used  their  swords  for  this  purpose  j 
churchmen  may  have  encouraged  them  in  such  acts  :  but  the  act  was 
not  necessary  for  the  nation,  the  churchman  ought  to  have  known 
that  he  had  powers  more  adequate  to  the  repression  of  such  evil. 
He  ought,  to  have  warned  the  statesman  not  to  meddle  with  his 
province,  and  to  have  told  him  how  very  important  his  arms  would 
prove  when  he  tried  them  against  spiritual  enemies.  But  whether 
he  has  done  this  or  not,  the  incorporation  of  his  spiritual  power 
with  the  national  power  is  the  great,  the  only  witness  for  this  truth. 
Separate  it  from  the  state,  and  the  state  ruler,  let  his  notions  be  as 
liberal  as  they  may,  must  and  will  use  his  power  for  keeping  down 
opinion.  You  may  preach  to  him  about  the  sin  and  folly  of  the 
attempt,  but  you  will  preach  in  vain.  He  cannot  shut  his  eyes  to 
the  fact,  that  Opinions  do  divide  his  subjects,  do  make  them  rebel- 
lious, do  lead  to  the  most  open  mischiefs.  He  cares  nothing  about 
them  in  themselves,  but  if  he  is  an  honest  man  he  cannot  be  stop- 
ped in  dealing  with  them  by  such  means  as  he  has,  when  the  interests 
which  are  committed  to  him  are  at  stake.  You  say  he  should 
leave  them  to  spiritual  influences ;  what  influences  ?    You  denied 


476 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


that  the  spiritual  influence  had  any  thing  to  do  with  the  nation. 
You  said  that  the  statesman  was  to  treat  it  as  something  entirely 
unconnected  with  him. 

I  have  spoken  in  this  instance  as  I  .wish  to  speak  in  all  others, 
to  what  I  believe  to  be  the  real  feeling  of  those  who  raise  the 
objection.  They  feel  that  there  is  a  Conscience  in  man,  to  be  re- 
verenced as  the  witness  of  God  in  his  creature.  There  is  no  truth 
I  am  more  anxious  to  assert  than  this.  If  there  were  no  con- 
science, no  ear  within  to  receive  the  voice  without,  I  do  not  know 
what  the  Law  would  address  by  its  terrors,  or  the  Gospel  by  its 
promises  of  life.  Without  it,  I  do  not  know  what  a  Nation  could 
mean — or  a  Church  could  mean.  But  is  it  not  curious  that  those  in 
our  day  and  in  our  country,  who  talk  most  about  the  rights  of  con- 
science in  their  speeches,  are  least  willing,  in  their  more  learned  dis- 
courses, to  admit  the  fact  of  a  conscience;  nay,  actually  denounce 
the  idea  of  a  conscience,  as  inconsistent  with  the  doctrine  of  human 
depravity  %  And  to  this  point  I  believe  all  must  come  who  do  not 
think  that  there  is  a  constitution  for  man,  and  that  his  depravity  is 
shown  in  his  refusing  to  abide  in  that  constitution  ;  in  his  choosing 
to  be  a  separate  self-willed  creature.  We  say  that  his  Conscience 
is  continually  protesting  against  his  self-will ;  that  the  office  of  the 
Nation  is  by  stern  and  righteous  punishment  to  restrain  that  self- 
will  when  it  breaks  out  into  acts ;  that  the  office  of  the  Church  is, 
by  gracious  and  loving  methods,  to  bring  out  the  true  free-will  of 
which  it  is  the  base  counterfeit.  In  like  manner  we  say,  that  the 
office  of  the  nation  is  to  punish  those  overt  acts  of  folly,  proceeding 
from  man's  private  judgment,  which  disturb  the  order  of  the  com- 
monwealth ;  that  the  office  of  the  Church  is  to  teach  men  how 
they  may  rise  above  their  private  judgments,  and  attain  that  clear 
manly  judgment  which  is  one  of  the  best  qualifications  of  a  good 
citizen.  Sad  is  it  when  men  are  taught  to  indulge  their  self-will 
and  their  selfish  judgments,  and  when  these  qualities  of  the  evil  na- 
ture are  invested  with  the  awful  name  of  conscience.  Sad  is  it  for 
national  order  and  for  spiritual  life. 

The  complaint  that  the  relations  between  the  Church  and  the 
nation  have  always  been  productive  of  conflicts,  I  have  considered 
sufficiently  in  a  former  part  of  this  chapter.  The  fact  is  undoubted ; 
the  nation  has  tried  to  usurp  the  prerogatives  of  the  Church,  the 


THE  SEPARATIST. 


477 


Church  has  tried  to  usurp  the  prerogatives  of  the  nation.  All  history 
is  full  of  such  records  ;  so  also  it  is  full  of  disputes  between  parents 
and  children,  brothers  and  sisters,  kings  and  subjects.  Undoubted- 
ly, if  we  could  get  rid  of  relationships,  we  should  not  have  to  read 
continual  accounts  of  their  being  violated.  But  can  you  get  rid  of 
them  unless  you  unmake  God's  world,  and  turn  it  into  a  wilderness  ? 
Can  you  cause  that  that  which  speaks  to  man's  inner  life,  should 
not  stand  in  some  connexion  with  that  which  speaks  to  him  as  an 
inhabitant  of  this  earth  ?  Has  he  not  both  a  spirit  and  a  body  ? 
Does  the  fact  that  they  are  continually  at  variance,  prove  that  there 
is  no  law  of  fellowship  between  them  ? 

But  the  union  of  the  Church  with  the  Nation  is  a  hinderance  to 
the  reformation  of  the  Church  when  it  becomes  corrupt.  The 
evidence  of  this  fact  from  history  is  particularly  weak.  There 
have  been  great  attempts  at  reformation  in  the  Church,  conducted 
in  opposition  to  the  civil  power.  Such,  for  instance,  was  the  re- 
formation attempted  by  Hildebrand  in  the  eleventh  century  ;  such 
were  many  of  the  reforms  attempted  by  the  religious  orders.  There 
have  been  other  reformations  carried  on  in  conjunction  with  civil 
rulers.  Such  was  the  Lutheran  reformation,  in  Saxony ;  the  Zu- 
inglian  and  Calvinistic  reformation,  in  Switzerland ;  the  reforma- 
tion in  Sweden,  in  Holland,  in  England.  In  all  these  last  cases, 
the  civil  rulers  wTere  the  patrons  and  promoters  of  reformation.  I 
can  see  evils  in  all  these  changes ;  those  carried  on  by  the  Church 
against  the  civil  power,  and  those  carried  on  by  the  civil  power. 
But  is  the  English  dissenter  prepared  to  say  that  the  first  were  in 
their  conduct  and  results  very  much  better  than  the  last  ?  If  he  is 
not,  he  must  abandon  his  principle,  that  the  Church  has  no  chance 
of  being  purified  from  her  irregularities  except  when  she  stands 
wholly  aloof  from  the  State.  If  he  is,  he  must  defend  himself  as 
well  as  he  can  from  the  charge  of  Popery.  To  me  it  seems  clear, 
from  experience  as  well  as  reason,  that  the  State  is  an  excellent 
admonisher  to  the  Church  respecting  her  inward  corruptions,  be- 
cause it  comes  in  contact  with  those  outward  evils  which  are  the 
fruits  of  them,  even  as  the  Church  is  a  most  excellent  admonisher 
to  the  State  respecting  its  sins,  because  their  effects  in  destroying 
the  nation's  heart  are  most  evident  to  the  spiritual  man;  but 

31 


478 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


that  each  will  do  mischief  if  it  attempts,  according  to  its  own  max- 
ims, to  set  the  other  right. 


SECTION  IV. 

THE  PATRICIAN. 

Idea  ef  a  Golden  Age. — Allegorical  Interpretations  of  the  Old  Testament. — Church  Dis- 
cipline.— Extrusion  of  Heretics. — Catholic  Unity  amidst  National  Peculiarities. 

There  is  still  another  class  of  objectors  to  my  statement,  whose 
opinions  are  entitled  to  great  consideration.  They  do  not  look  upon 
the  union  of  the  Church  with  the  civil  power  in  different  nations 
as  a  positive  evil.  It  was  God's  ordinance,  to  be  submitted  to  like 
every  thing  else  which  He  appoints.  '  But  to  say  that  the  Church 
is  better  for  this  state  of  things,  that  its  circumstances  in  Modern 
Europe  are  better  than  its  circumstances  were  in  the  first  five  or  six 
centuries,  is  false  and  dangerous.  The  age  of  the  Fathers  is  the 
pattern  on  the  Mount — the  true  model  of  a  Catholic  Church ;  in 
■which  there  was  fellowship  in  faith  and  worship,  discipline  for  mo- 
ral offenders,  separation  from  wilful  heretics.  Since  that  time  the 
Eastern  Church  has  been  separated  from  the  western,  Protestants 
have  divided  themselves  from  Romanists;  heresies  have  been  tol- 
erated, discipline  made  light  of,  the  idea  of  national  Churches  substi- 
tuted for  the  idea  of  a  universal  Church,  in  each  particular  nation 
the  Church  regarded  as  part  of  the  civil  establishment.  This  is  a 
condition  of  things  to  be  borne  with  humiliation  and  patience,  not 
to  be  spoken  of  with  triumph.' 

1.  The  feeling  that  there  has  been  a  golden  age  of  the  Church 
to  which  we  may  look  back,  and  for  the  restoration  of  which  we 
may  pray,  has  been  so  deeply  rooted  in  the  minds  of  men,  in  the  most 
various  circumstances,  and  holding  the  most  various  opinions,  that 
he  must  be  a  very  thoughtless  Christian  indeed  who  could  treat  it 
lightly.  Nor  can  those  who  would  restrict  this  age  to  the  times 
before  Constantine,  or  those  who  would  confine  it  within  the  lives 
of  the  Apostles,  fairly  complain  against  the  eulogists  of  the  first  six 
centuries.  For  it  is  clear,  that  in  one  sense  even  the  most  limited 
period  cannot  be  called  a  period  of  purity.  As  long  as  the  epistles  to 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


479 


the  Corinthians  and  the  Galatians  remain  in  the  Canon,  nay>  till  every 
epistle  be  weeded  of  some  of  its  most  striking  warnings  and  exhor- 
tations, we  must  be  content  to  admit  (every  body  has  practically  ad- 
mitted), that  there  were  spots  even  then  in  the  feasts  of  charity; 
yea,  that  every  form  of  corruption,  every  habit  which  threatens 
apostasy,  might  be  found  in  the  infant  family  of  Christ.  Do  we,  then, 
betake  ourselves  to  the  notion,  that  the  glory  of  the  apostolic  period 
is  to  be  sought  in  the  ministers  of  the  Church  though  not  in  its 
members  ?  The  epistles  to  the  angels  of  the  seven  churches  come 
in  to  perplex  this  conclusion.  Some  of  these  had  lost  their  first 
love,  some  did  not  exercise  discipline,  some  were  guilty  of  tolerating 
a  heresy,  (which  a  moderately  well  supported  ecclesiastical  tradi- 
tion would  trace  to  one  of  the  seven  Deacons,)  some  had  a  name  to 
live  and  were  dead,  some  were  neither  hot  nor  cold.  Are  we, 
then,  ready  to  give  up  altogther  the  feeling,  that  the  apostolic 
periods  were  different  from  other  periods  1  If  not,  I  think  we  must 
resort  to  some  such  hypothesis  as  this,  which  will  perhaps  really 
satisfy  the  minds  of  most  men,  who  will  give  themselves  leisure 
to  consider  it.  That  there  was  a  more  distinct  and  evident  conflict 
in  the  age  of  the  Apostles  with  different  forms  of  evil,  both  without 
and  within  the  Church,  than  there  ever  has  been  since.  It  was  a 
critical  period,  one  might  say  the  critical  period  in  the  history  of 
mankind,  and  therefore  was  one  which  brought  to  light  all  dark 
images  side  by  side  with  the  perfect  light  to  which  they  were  op- 
posed. And  this,  it  may  be,  is  the  true  idea  of  the  golden  age  ; 
at  all  events,  the  only  one  which  the  past  history  of  the  Church 
presents  to  us — not  an  age  of  innocence,  but  an  age  of  conflict ; 
not  one  which  was  holding  itself  up  as  a  model  to  the  world,  but 
which  was  bringing  out  the  idea  of  the  Church  as  a  body  belonging 
to  no  age  ;  as  the  permanent  witness  against  that  secular  spirit  which 
would  always  make  some  period  of  time,  and  not  the  principles 
exhibited  in  that  time,  the  object  of  its  admiration. 

Now  surely  the  history  of  the  Church  for  the  first  five  for  six 
centuries,  does  present  the  Church  in  the  same  kind  of  struggle  as 
this  which  we  have  discovered  in  the  apostolic  time.  The  battle 
is  somewhat  changed  in  its  character  after  the  accession  of  Con- 
stantine,  but  who  will  say  that  it  was  less  severe  ?  Or  who  will 
venture  to  affirm  that  the  divine  image  was  less  brought  out  through 


480 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


these  strifes  in  such  men  as  Athanasius  and  Chrysostom,  than  it  had 
been  in  Ignatius  or  Justin  ?    The  whole  history  of  this  century  is 
a  book  of  the  wars  of  the  Lord ;  most  precious,  surely,  because  it 
shows  how  the  principle  of  strength  made  perfect  in  weakness 
was  working  itself  out  in  individual  men  and  in  the  whole  of  so- 
ciety ;  because  it  shows  how  the  shouts  of  the  soldiers  of  the 
Cross  were  laying  low  the  highest  Babel  tower  that  was  ever 
raised  in  this  world ;  becaues  it  shows  that  the  scheme  of  God  was 
to  prevail,  and  that  nothing  was  to  withstand  it.    But  surely  this 
is  the  picture  which  that  time  presents;  not  a  picture  of  still, 
beautiful,  pastoral  life,  but  of  great  crimes  and  great  virtues — often- 
times appearing  in  the  same  men,  yet  always  illustrating  each 
other ;  always  enabling  us,  if  we  look,  to  see  what  man  is  with 
God  and  without  Him.    He  has  been  pleased  to  exhibit  to  us  this 
age,  not  in  particular  specimens  of  virtue  and  excellence,  but  as  a 
whole ;  as  a  whole  it  is  precious  to  us.    We  lose  the  blessing  of 
it,  we  lose  the  idea  of  the  Church  which  it  presents,  if  we  omit 
any  of  its  darker  features.    Let  us  consider,  then,  what  we  do 
when  we  desire  that  this  age,  so  invaluable  as  a  portion  of  history, 
should  be  restored  to  us  in  fact.    If  wre  ask  that  the  age  in  which 
St.  Paul  preached  may  come  again,  we  ask  that  Nero  may  come 
again ;  if  we  ask  that  we  may  be  transported  back  to  the  glorious 
period  of  Athanasius,  we  ask  to  live  under  the  tyrant  Constantius, 
to  have  the  wrorld  almost  wholly  pagan,  to  have  the  Church 
almost  wholly  Arian.    If  we  long  to  sit  at  the  feet  of  Chrysostom, 
we  long  for  the  infamous  corruptions  of  Antioch  and  Constantino- 
ple, for  the  government  of  Eutropius,  for  the  horrible  villanies  of 
the  eunuchs  of  the  palace.    If  we  reckon  that  it  would  have  been 
a  blessing  to  live  under  the  teaching  of  Augustine,  we  must  be 
content  to  see  Rome  sacked  by  one  set  of  barbarians,  and  the 
Church  in  Africa  threatened  by  another  ;  we  must  get  our  learn- 
ing from  a  race  of  effete  rhetoricians;  we  must  dwell  amidst  all 
the  seductions  and  abominations  of  Manicheism.    These  are  very 
common-place  considerations ;  but  as  they  are  true,  it  is  very  ad- 
visable for  the  honour  of  the  Church  and  of  its  Head,  as  well  as  for 
the  removal  of  a  certain  fantastic  habit  of  mind,  which  is  most 
alien  from  the  temper  of  the  early  ages,  that  we  should  occasion- 
ally dwell  upon  them.  The  effect  of  doing  so  cannot  be  to  make 


i'HE  PATRICIAN. 


481 


us  fall  into  any  contempt  of  the  Fathers,  or  to  adopt  those  notions 
respecting  them  which  have  been  propagated  of  late  in  this  coun- 
try with  so  much  more  of  self-conceit  than  learning,  and  which 
could  only  have  gained  currency  through  some  weakness  in  the 
theory  to  which  they  were  opposed.  Unquestionably,  if  we  are 
reasonable  men,  the  more  we  look  at  that  mass  of  evil  in  society, 
which  the  Church  was  sent  to  decompose,  the  more  we  shall  ad- 
mire the  power  which  decomposed  it,  and  be  thankful  for  the  in- 
struments by  whom  He  worked. 

2.  But,  then,  can  we  do  this,  and  not  see  something  more  than 
a  permission  of  those  national  societies  which  the  Church  called 
into  being,  and  with  which,  in  the  Western  world,  she  became 
identified  1  Must  we  not  believe  that  this  was  a  mighty  step  in 
the  development  of  the  divine  scheme,  in  the  establishment  of  the 
divine  kingdom  upon  earth  ?  The  Church  had  been  brought  out 
as  one  body  existing  in  different  places,  to  try  its  strength  against 
the  Roman  world,  and  it  had  prevailed.  It  had  made  good  the 
principle  upon  which  it  stood  against  the  most  terrible  odds.  What 
so  reasonable  as  to  believe  that  it  was  to  carry  on  its  work  of  crea- 
tion, in  the  very  line  in  which  the  world's  work  of  destruction  had 
been  carried  on;  that  as  the  Roman  empire  had  swallowed  up  all 
nations  into  itself,  its  mighty  antagonist  was  to  make  them  breathe 
again,  to  show  each  what  its  proper  place  and  function  was  in 
God's  proper  place  and  commonwealth  ?  Are  we  told  that  this 
doctrine  savours  of  those  modern  theories  respecting  progression? 
which  are  so  godless  and  intolerable  ?  I  care  not  what  ill  name 
may  be  given  it,  provided  it  justifies  the  ways  of  God  to  man,  and 
shows  that  the  Church  has  not  existed  for  nothing.  But  if  by  this 
charge  it  be  meant  that  we  are  supporting  a  notion  of  progress, 
which  is  inconsistent  with  the  permanency  of  God's  order  and 
truth,  there  never  was  one  so  ill  supported  or  so  unfortunate.  They 
are  the  innovators,  they  are  the  deniers  of  the  permanence  of  God's 
order,  they  would  make  the  Church  merely  a  growth  out  of  fore- 
gone and  exhausted  states  of  society,  who  maintain  that  national 
life,  upon  which  so  much  honour  was  put  in  the  old  world,  has 
been  discarded  as  worthless  in  the  new.  We  say  that  there  was 
no  such  alteration  in  the  counsels  of  the  Divine  mind,  that  the  his- 
tory of  modern  Europe  proves  there  was  not.    We  say  that  the 


482 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


constitution  of  the  Church,  as  it  was  exhibited  during  the  conflicts 
with  the  Roman  empire,  was  simply  an  universal  constitution ;  we 
rejoice  that  it  was  so;  hereby  such  a  constitution  was  shown  to 
exist,  hereby  the  meaning  of  past  history,  which  had  all  been  lead- 
ing to  the  discovery  of  it,  was  made  evident.  But  we  say  that 
this  constitution  was  necessarily  imperfect,  for  it  left  all  the  rela- 
tions of  men,  as  held  together  by  the  bonds  of  neighbourhood,  as 
distinguished  by  race  and  language,  unaccounted  for ;  it  did  not 
bring  these  relations  under  Church  influence.  And  we  say  that, 
seeing  these  relations  are  especially  developed  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, it  was  the  necessary  consequence  of  this  imperfection,  that 
one  aspect  of  that  Testament  should  be  lost  to  the  first  age  of  the 
Church.  I  know  that  I  am  using  language  which  will  shock  some 
good  persons,  and  therefore  I  will  endeavour  to  explain  myself. 

3.  It  is  commonly  said  that  the  Fathers  must  be  looked  to  as 
the  interpreters  of  Scripture,  in  consequence  of  their  proximity  to 
the  Apostles,  the  opportunities  they  might  have  had  of  hearing  the 
very  words  which  they  uttered,  &c.  I  confess  I  have  never  been 
able  to  understand  this  doctrine  of  proximity.  It  would  seem  to 
me  to  prove  that  Athanasius,  or  Ambrose,  or  Augustine,  must  be  of 
far  less  value  to  us,  as  elucidators  of  truth,  than  Hermas  or  Igna- 
tius; and  I  do  not  think  that  this  has  been  the  practical  feeling  of 
the  Church  in  any  age.  It  would  have  seemed  to  me  rather,  that 
the  great  worth  of  the  Fathers  arose  from  their  being  placed  by 
God  in  circumstances  which  especially  enabled  them  to  apprehend 
certain  great  truths,  especially  those  foundation  truths  which  con- 
cern his  Being  and  the  order  of  the  Universal  Society.  Adopting 
that  view,  I  can  believe  that  each  had  his  own  special  merits  ;  that 
the  Alexandrian  might  see  that  which  the  Latin  could  not  see ;  that 
one  principle  would  be  brought  out  in  mighty  power  by  him  who 
struggled  with  Arians,  another  by  him  who,  in  his  own  heart  and 
in  the  world,  had  done  battle  with  Manicheism.  Adopting  the 
other,  I  think  that  I  shall  not  only  be  in  danger  of  making  an  age 
into  a  Church,  but  of  exalting  particular  individuals  of  that  age 
above  others,  to  whom  perhaps  a  more  important  work  was  com- 
mitted. 

But  whichever  of  these  views  be  adopted,  it  will  be  difficult  to 
prove  that  the  Fathers  had  any  better  means  than  other  men  of  un- 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


483 


derstanding  the  circumstances  of  the  Jewish  nation.  They  had  no 
proximity  with  the  Fathers  of  that  nation.  The  Jews  with  whom 
they  could  converse  were  either  those  in  whom  the  national  feel- 
ings had  been  merged  in  more  general  Catholic  sympathies,  or 
those  who  were  trying  to  set  up  their  old  national  distinctions 
against  the  Church,  or  those  who  regarded  their  whole  past  his- 
tory as  little  more  than  a  collection  of  allegories,  or  the  develop- 
ment of  a  Mosaic  philosophy.  Again,  their  circumstances  could 
give  them  no  sort  of  sympathy  with  the  old  national  life  of  the 
Jews  ;  the  temple  was  gone,  the  city  was  laid  waste;  these  events 
had  been  necessary  to  the  establishment  of  the  universal  Church, 
and  that  Church  stood  in  the  midst  of  a  great  empire,  in  which 
there  was  no  nation  "  that  moved  the  wing,  or  opened  the  mouth, 
or  peeped."  Would  it  not  have  been  most  reasonable  to  expect, 
under  such  circumstances,  that  so  far  as  they  were  polemical,  they 
might  be  able  to  prove  clearly  that  the  Jewish  commonwealth  was 
meant  to  be  the  seed  of  a  great  tree ;  so  far  as  they  were  experi- 
mental, that  the  Jewish  saints  had  struggled  with  the  same  internal 
enemies,  which  were  assailing  themselves ;  so  far  as  they  were 
mystical,  that  there  had  been  an  invisible  guide  and  teacher,  train- 
ing man  to  know  Him  through  all  past  ages  of  history  :  but  that 
whatever  belonged  to  the  common,  daily,  human  life  of  the  Jews 
would  be  utterly  puzzling  to  them,  would  seem  quite  out  of  place 
in  a  divine  book,  and  would  therefore  of  necessity  be  translated 
into  cabalistic  lore  ?  I  say,  would  not  any  one  expect  this  from 
the  position  m  which  the  Fathers  were  placed  ?  And  if  the  facts 
should  be  found  exactly  to  accord  with  these  expectations,  if  every 
Christian  of  the  present  day  who  looks  into  them  should  be  puz- 
zled and  perplexed  by  curious  and  subtle  spiritualizations  of  facts, 
which  simply  as  facts  have  been  his  delight  as  a  child,  and  which, 
as  he  grew  to  be  a  man,  have  seemed  to  connect  themselves  with 
what  is  passing  in  the  world  around  him  ;  if  there  be  a  use  of  this 
spiritualizing  method,  which  the  Church  even  of  that  age  has  itself 
condemned,  if  yet  this  extravagant  use  of  it  was  justified  in  the 
practice  of  the  most  learned  and  laborious  of  all  the  Fathers,  and 
if  it  be  most  difficult  to  find  where  the  point  is  at  which  he  trans- 
gressed the  legitimate  rule,  is  it  more  wise  and  pious,  and  more 
respectful  to  these  holy  men,  to  say  that  they  could  not  take  in  the 


484 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


literal  meaning  of  the  old  Scriptures,  so  as  to  give  that  literal  mean- 
ing any  life,  and  that  it  was  not  intended  they  should  do  so ;  or  to 
determine  that  we  will  make  out  a  case  for  them  by  renouncing  all 
our  own  advantages,  by  resolutely  praising  a  system  of  interpre- 
tation which  our  consciences  and  hearts  are  continually  repudiating ; 
and  then,  after  all,  to  give  up  the  defence  of  it  when  it  is  clearly 
and  consistently  worked  out  1 

I  will  not  stop  to  remark,  what  must  be  obvious  to  every  per- 
son who  considers  the  foregoing  statements,  that  the  ideas  of  the 
Fathers  respecting  marriage,  property,  every  institution  which  be- 
longs in  the  first  place  to  our  earthly  condition,  must  have  been 
exceedingly  affected  by  their  views  of  the  Old  Testament  generally. 
In  all  cases  they  will  have  sought  for  the  highest,  most  transcen- 
dental ground  upon  which  such  ordinances  were  to  be  defended ; 
since  they  must  exist,  they  will  readily  have  looked  upon  them  as 
types  of  something  higher;  but  how  to  connect  the  type  with  the 
actual  fact,  how  to  avoid  the  conclusion,  that  that  which  is  not  di- 
rectly of  heaven  belongs  in  some  sense  to  human  depravity,  was 
impossible.  It  will  be  impossible,  I  believe,  for  us,  if  we  do  not  feel 
something  more  than  a  grumbling  acquiescence  in  the  scheme  of 
God  for  the  education  of  our  race,  if  we  do  not  acknowledge,  that 
by  restoring  national  life  through  the  means  of  the  Church,  He 
was  carrying  out  the  law  of  redemption,  and  showing  how  every 
thing  that  belongs  to  man  and  his  position  here,  every  thing  that 
does  not  involve  the  violation  of  that  position,  is  comprehended 
under  it. 

4.  But  it  is  affirmed  that  the  discipline  of  moral  offenders  was 
recognised  by  the  early  Church  as  essential  to  its  existence,  and  is 
almost  lost  sight  of  since  the  Church  entered  into  fellowship  with  the 
nations.  I  admit  at  once  that  the  principle  of  spiritual  discipline,  of  a 
discipline  for  the  rectification  of  habits  and  principles,  a  discipline  far 
more  deep  and  subtle  than  any  which  lawgivers  can  exercise,  is 
implied  in  the  constitution  of  the  spiritual  body,  and  that  it  was 
first  manifested  to  the  world,  like  all  the  other  principles  of  the 
Church's  polity,  in  its  first  ages.  I  admit,  further,  that  in  connex- 
ion with  this  highest  power,  there  is  one  implied  in  the  very  exist- 
ence of  every  society,  (but  especially  necessary  to  such  a  society  as 
the  Church,)  of  noticing  the  more  outward  and  flagrant  transgres- 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


485 


sions  committed  by  its  members,  and  of  determining  how  far  they 
exclude  the  offender  from  its  privileges.  This  power,  I  conceive, 
was  not  only  exercised  by  the  early  Church,  but  was  almost  the 
only  witness  to  the  degraded,  sensualized  slaves  of  a  military  des- 
potism, that  there  is  any  authority  in  heaven  or  earth  competent  to 
punish  the  offences  of  the  high  as  well  as  of  the  low.  One  such 
example  as  that  which  St.  Ambrose  gave,  in  his  sentence  upon 
Theodosius,  was  for  its  practical  effect  worth  all  the  tomes  of  the 
Roman  juris-consults.  But  yet  the  history  of  that  transaction, 
and  of  all  the  other  transactions  of  that  period,  proves  that  the 
Church  was  utterly  unable  to  deal  with  the  accumulated  mass  of 
profligacy,  which  was  to  be  found  among  those  who  had  been  ad- 
mitted to  its  fellowship.  Councils  might  determine  that  such  and 
such  crimes  excluded  the  offender  for  five,  or  six,  or  twenty  years 
from  the  Eucharist,  yet  we  know  that  crimes  of  the  blackest  cha- 
racter were  prepared  by  clergymen  as  well  as  laymen.  And  it 
must  occur  to  every  one  sometimes  to  ask  himself  whether  the 
Church,  while  she  was  claiming  such  lofty  and  heavenly  powers, 
was  not  frequently  compelled  by  the  circumstances  in  which  she 
was  placed,  to  degrade  these  powers,  and  to  assume  far  too  mucl 
the  character  of  a  mere  spiritual  policy. 

Now  I  readily  allow,  that  the  effect  of  the  restoration  of  fixed, 
positive  national  law,  and  of  outward  formal  tribunals  for  the  pun- 
ishment of  crime,  has  been  to  make  men  less  sensible  of  the  mean- 
ing and  of  the  need  of  spiritual  discipline.  And  the  more  strict 
and  definite  this  law  has  become,  and  the  more  men  in  general 
have  been  brought  to  acknowledge  it  as  a  fixed,  necessary  element 
in  their  lives,  so  much  the  less  has  the  sense  of  another  kind  of 
government,  one  reaching  to  the  feelings  and  character,  prevailed  ; 
nay,  there  has  been  a  desire  to  get  rid  of  it  altogether.  But  none 
of  these  facts  convince  me,  that  the  establishment  of  outward  law, 
the  formation  of  national  societies,  were  not  parts  of  God's  great 
scheme  for  developing  more  fully  the  nature  and  character  of 
Christ's  kingdom.  Looking  at  the  question  in  the  most  obvious 
way,  if  I  compare  the  state  of  any  nation  in  modern  Europe,  I 
*wTould  include  even  Russia,  with  that  which  we  know  to  have 
been  the  state  of  the  Roman  and  Byzantine  empires  during  the  first 


486 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION 


seven  centuries,  I  should  really  tremble  for  my  own  ingratitude,  if 
I  did  not  wonder  at  the  change  which  God  has  wrought.  And 
this  change,  I  affirm  to  be  not  merely  one  in  outward  and  material 
happiness,  but  one  connected  with  the  very  ends  for  which  the 
Church  exists.  It  does  seem  to  me,  in  the  first  place,  a  positive 
good  that  the  Church  should  not  be  looked  upon  at  all  in  the  light 
of  a  police,  that  there  should  be  another  body  performing  that  func- 
tion, and  leaving  it  to  find  out  its  own.  And  next,  I  believe  that 
every  circumstance  in  the  later  history  of  Europeans  has  been  en- 
abling the  Church  in  each  nation  to  discover  if  she  will  what  her 
powers  are,  how  much  greater  than  those  of  the  statesman — how 
indispensable  to  the  statesman.  In  the  first  age,  spiritual  discipline 
tried  to  be  every  thing.  Since  that  time,  outward  law  has  tried  to 
be  every  thing ;  the  existence  of  spiritual  discipline  has  been  for- 
gotten. I  showed,  in  my  first  part,  how  clearly  and  awfully  it 
has  been  demonstrated  that  law  cannot  do  what  it  wishes  to  do  and 
pretends  to  do.  Thus,  then,  I  think  we  are  coming  to  a  time, 
when  the  spiritual  side  of  Christ's  kingdom  must  come  forth  into  a 
prominence  which  it  has  not  yet  assumed  ;  when  the  education  and 
discipline  which  the  Church  exercises  will  be  demanded  by  each 
nation  for  the  preservation  of  its  own  existence.  But  the  Church, 
I  believe,  can  only  profit  by  this  great  crisis  in  the  history  of  man- 
kind, if  she  be  ready  to  acknowledge  that  according  to  the  will  of 
her  author  and  her  Lord  she  is  not  meant  to  have  an  independent 
existence ;  that  she  is  not  meant  to  be  extra-national ;  that  she 
has  no  commission  or  powers  which  dispense  with  the  necessity  of 
positive,  formal  law,  and  with  outward  government ;  that  her 
highest  honour  is  to  be  the  life-giving  energy  to  every  body  in  the 
midst  of  which  she  dwells. 

5.  "  But  the  Church  in  old  times  was  able  to  cast  heretics  out 
of  her  bosom.  When  she  becomes  connected  with  a  nation,  it 
either  undertakes  the  punishment  of  them  by  its  own  vulgar 
methods,  or  else  entertains  them  and  tolerates  them,  without  pay- 
ing the  least  heed  to  the  Church's  sentence."  Here,  again,  I  be- 
lieve the  same  observations  apply.  The  character  and  constitution 
of  the  Church  in  the  early  ages  were,  I  think,  manifested  in  its* 
contest  with  heretics.    One  or  another  partial  theory  was  broach- 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


4S7 


ed,  one  or  another  article  of  the  Creeds  were  set  aside  or  pared 
away.  The  Church,  often  against  terrible  odds,  asserted  the  integ- 
rity of  her  constitution  ;  asserted  that  spiritual  unity  which  is  the 
ground  of  her  existence.  That  there  might  not  be  divisions,  she 
was  driven  to  draw  subtle  distinctions,  submitting  oftentimes  to  the 
charge  of  logomachy,  that  she  might  maintain  the  realities  which 
logomaehists  were  making  void;  often  seeming  to  puzzle  the  way- 
farer that  she  might  preserve  to  him  his  inheritance.  This  was 
her  conflict  at  that  time  ;  for  this  end  it  was  necessary  she  should 
have  her  individual  champions  and  her  general  councils.  I  have 
no  doubt  this  was  the  work  of  the  early  Church,  and  that  amidst 
all  the  sins  even  of  her  best  and  bravest  members,  she  fulfilled  it  as 
it  was  meant  to  be  fulfilled. 

But  does  not  every  one  feel  in  reading  ecclesiastical  history, 
that  this  position,  though  in  some  respects  a  glorious  one,  was  in 
many  an  unfortunate  one  ?  In  these  struggles  with  those  -who 
would  have  divided  her,  the  Church  was  maintaining  her  character 
as  a  kingdom,  cohering  by  its  relation  to  an  awful  name,  which  it 
was  bound  to  assert  and  defend.  And  yet  the  impression  of  her 
having  this  character  was  in  no  slight  degree  impaired  by  the 
strifes  into  which  she  entered  for  the  sake  of  it.  These  led  men 
more  and  more  to  fancy  that  the  battle  was  for  a  set  of  dogmas 
or  opinions,  which  the  particular  set  of  doctors  called  Catholics 
had  agreed  to  maintain  against  the  world,  but  which,  unfortunate- 
ly, they  could  not  settle  among  themselves.  Supposing  Pagans 
or  Jews  had  taken  up  this  notion,  it  might  be  a  matter  of  regret ; 
but  if  Christians  and  Christian  teachers  fell  into  it  themselves,  the 
very  existence  of  the  Church  was  put  in  peril.  And  it  is  evident 
that  this  was  the  case.  The  Greeks  especially,  priding  themselves 
upon  that  gift  of  subtlety  which  has  in  all  ages  been  committed  to 
them,  seem  to  have  lost  unawares  the  entire  substance,  every  part 
of  which  they  were  able  with  such  accuracy  to  distinguish  ;  to 
have  called  forth  new  heresies  by  the  very  zeal  and  decrees  which 
suppressed  the  old  j  to  have  felt  less  and  less  that  the  Church  was 
any  thing  but  a  school,  even  while  they  were  resorting  most  un- 
scrupulously to  measures  which  could  only  be  justified  to  their  con- 
sciences by  the  belief  that  it  was  the  one  human  fellowship.  I 


488 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


think  we  must  all  feel  it  a  relief  to  escape  from  this  Greek  world 
of  controversy  into  the  Latin  world  of  business  and  enterprise. 
There  may  be  much  evil  there  too,  but  there  is  a  practical  work 
going  out  ;  societies  are  growing ;  the  Church  is  felt  to  be  herself 
a  society,  governed  by  certain  laws,  informed  by  a  certain  princi- 
ple. Who  can  help  feeling,  that  amidst  all  the  contradictions  of 
the  middle  ages,  the  sense  of  a  common  bond,  the  feeling  of  a  one 
spirit  and  a  one  object,  were  far  more  realized  than  they  had  been 
except  by  a  very  few  of  the  highest  minds  in  the  age  of  the  (Ecu- 
menical Councils  1  And  this  is  surely  what  one  would  expect,  if 
one  really  believed  that  the  Church  was  under  God's  government, 
and  that  He  was  making  its  meaning  and  power  manifest,  amidst 
all  the  perplexities  and  distractions  of  men's  self-will.  Now,  how- 
ever strange  it  may  appear,  the  connexion  of  Church  polity  with 
national  polity  was  certainly  the  means  of  keeping  this  feeling 
alive.  The  Greeks  could  not  look  upon  the  Church  as  a  kingdom? 
because  they  had  nothing  to  teach  them  what  a  kingdom  was ; 
they  were  living  under  a  despot  with  whose  government  they  had 
no  sympathy,  who  ruled  by  creatures  and  tools  not  as  the  centre  of 
a  social  order.  And  this  assertion  is  confirmed  by  a  fact  which 
seems  at  first  to  interfere  with  it,  and  to  supply  a  better  reason  for 
the  character  which  I  have  attributed  to  the  Western  Church.  The 
Pope,  it  will  be  said,  made  the  middle  ages  conscious  of  their 
Church  unity,  and  yet  the  Pope  was  the  great  antagonist  of  na- 
tional societies.  I  answer,  it  was  the  feeling  of  national  life  that 
grew  up  in  the  countries  of  the  West,  which  made  it  possible  that 
there  should  be  a  Bishop  assuming  the  position  which  the  Pope 
assumed.  When  once  the  national  feeling  had  been  strongly  de- 
veloped, it  was  impossible  to  view  the  Church  in  the  light  of  a 
mere  learned  school ;  men  were  obliged  to  look  upon  it  as  a  king- 
dom, for  it  was  exercising  the  powers  of  one,  and  in  no  other  cha- 
racter could  they  have  paid  it  homage.  Hence  it  was  possible  for 
the  Bishop  of  Rome  to  give  an  outward  formal  character  to  this 
kingdom,  to  put  himself  at  the  head  of  it,  and  though  amidst  con- 
tinual reluctations  and  manifestations  of  independence,  to  act  as 
the  feudal  superior  of  the  different  societies  into  wThich  Christen- 
dom was  divided.     But  mark  under  what  conditions  this  was 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


489 


possible.  The  Pope  himself  becomes  the  sovereign  of  a  state ;  he 
does  honour  to  the  very  principle  he  is  setting  at  nought.  I  feel,  of 
course,  all  the  anomaly  of  this  position  ;  but  it  explains,  I  think, 
clearly,  how  truly  it  was  the  will  of  God  that  the  Nations  should 
come  into  being,  and  how  necessary  this  was,  not  for  the  chastise- 
ment of  the  Church,  but  for  its  development.  And  to  return  to  the 
point  immediately  under  our  consideration,  it  is  in  this  way  that 
the  new  position  of  those  who  differed  from  the  doctrine  or  order  of 
the  Church  is  explained.  In  the  first  age,  they  are  pronounced 
guilty  of  violating  the  tradition  and  creed  of  the  universal  society ; 
in  the  second  age,  they  are  treated  as  invaders  of  the  order  and 
unity  of  the  particular  state  in  which  they  are  found,  or  of  the  states 
generally,  so  far  as  they  feel  themselves  united  for  a  common  ob- 
ject ;  in  the  third  age,  the  state  feels  that  it  consults  its  own  peace 
better  by  leaving  them  alone,  by  allowing  them  a  settled  position, 
by  treating  them  as  the  rest  of  its  subjects.  I  have  already  said 
why  I  believe  that  each  state  will  continue  to  do  this  only  just  so 
long  as  it  maintains  its  relation  with  a  spiritual  society ;  why,  the 
moment  it  becomes  a  mere  civil  body,  it  will  of  necessity  resort  to 
force  again  for  the  putting  down  of  opinion.  But  now  I  am  look- 
ing at  the  question  in  another  light,  and  I  would  ask  whether  this 
is  not  a  most  important  step  in  the  plans  of  God.  First,  the  spiritu- 
al society  in  her  general  councils  took  cognizance  of  schisms  and 
heresies,  but  in  doing  so  she  ran  the  risk  of  seeming  to  be  herself 
only  the  maintainer  of  a  certain  system  of  opinions,  not  the  pillar 
and  ground  of  truth.  She  inadvertently  cultivated  the  very  spirit 
of  disputation  which  she  wished  to  check.  Next,  the  particular 
states  show  that  they  are  interested  in  the  repression  of  these 
schisms  and  heresies,  hereby  testifying  that  they  are  of  a  practical 
character,  that  they  do  really  interfere  with  government  and 
order.  But  in  bearing  this  testimony,  the  states  were  also  doing 
a  great  injury  to  the  Church  ;  they  were  putting  themselves  into  its 
place  ;  they  were  using  vulgar  visible  arms,  for  the  accomplish- 
ment of  an  invisible  and  spiritual  end. 

Lastly,  the  states  have  foreborne,  or  are  inclined  to  forbear, 
from  these  experiments,  having  found  them  to  be  ineffectual.  But 
in  turn,  they  are  inclined  to  look  upon  all  spiritual  matters  as  trans- 
acted between  quarrelling  schools  and  sects,  with  whom  the  national 


490 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


government  has  little  to  do ;  except  when  they  become  very  vio- 
lent to  keep  peace  between  them ;  at  other  times  leaving  them  to 
carry  on  the  work  of  mutual  destruction.  Now,  I  say,  if  there  be 
a  Church  in  the  world,  these  are  circumstances  in  which  she  can 
produce  an  evidence  of  her  reality  which  she  could  not  produce  in 
either  of  the  previous  periods.  She  cannot  cut  off  heretics  from 
her  communion,  for  they  have  cut  themselves  off — they  do  not  care 
for  her  communion.  But  she  can  show  that  she  has  that  secret 
power  within  her  which  may  unite  them  ;  that  those  nice  distinc- 
tions of  fathers  and  of  councils  were  not  really  distinctions  meant 
to  cause  separation,  but  to  prevent  it ;  meant  to  preserve  truth  in 
its  fulness  and  completeness  against  a  time,  when  men,  having 
tried  their  different  plans  and  methods  of  thought,  should  begin 
to  desire  that  which  would  reconcile  them,  and  when  they  should 
acknowledge  no  higher  evidence  of  a  divine  mission  in  any  body 
than  this,  that  it  satisfies  the  aspiration.  The  Church,  again, 
cannot  make  civil  rulers  perceive  that  she  has  a  power  of  the  same 
kind  which  they  possess,  for  when  they  have  fought  her  with  her 
own  weapons,  they  have  prevailed  and  she  has  been  foiled ;  but 
she  may  prove  to  them  that  she  has  another  power,  entirely  distinct 
from  theirs,  far  higher  than  theirs,  to  which  they  must  resort,  or 
perish  in  their  feebleness. 

6.  I  will  conclude  this  head  with  one  or  two  remarks  upon  the 
alleged  impossibility  of  recognising  a  one  Catholic  Church  under 
the  distinctions  and  limitations  of  national  bcdies.  'How,' it  is 
asked, '  can  a  Church  be  one  if  it  have  no  visible  tokens  of  unity  1 
Those  who  dream  with  the  Quakers,  that  the  Church  is  a  purely  spir- 
itual unseen  body,  may  perchance  think  that  all  ceremonial  uniformity 
is  of  no  worth.  But  the  defenders  of  National  Churches  are  very 
far  from  any  such  notion  as  this.  They  require  that  the  ecclesias- 
tical organization  should  be  strict  and  formal.  Yet,  according  to 
them,  it  must  have  a  different  organization  in  every  country,  for 
there  can  be  no  general  councils,  seeing  that  every  thing  is  subject 
to -the  will  of  particular  princes,  and  seeing  that  even  provincial 
synods,  and  national  convocations,  are  regarded  with  great  jealousy 
by  the  civil  power.  What  can  happen,  then,  but  the  Church  should 
lose  all  the  features  by  which  its  identity  is  ascertained  in  different 
parts  of  the  earth,  that  it  should  gradually  become  more  and  more 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


491 


accommodated  to  the  habits  of  particular  districts ;  till  at  last  it 
becomes  more  proud  of  that  which  separates  it  from  other  com- 
munities in  other  parts  of  the  world,  than  of  that  which  it  has  in 
common  with  them.' 

My  answer  to  these  arguments  is  this:  I  have  maintained 
against  the  Quaker,  that  there  are  certain  permanent  ordinances  in 
which  the  character  and  universality  of  the  Church  are  expressed  ; 
she  does  not,  therefore,  depend  for  her  unity,  upon  the  faith  and 
feeling  of  her  particular  members,  but  bears  a  constant  and  abiding 
testimony  against  the  want  of  faith  or  feeling  in  any  or  all  of  them. 
If  this  be  a  true  doctrine,  if  it  be  the  will  of  God,  that  these  ordi- 
nances should  denote  the  universal  and  spiritual  society,  we  should 
naturally  expect  that  He  would  manifest  the  distinction  between 
them,  and  every  thing  which  is  but  accidentally  connected  with 
them.    Evidently  there  are  some  accidents  with  which  they  must 
of  necessity  be  connected.    Baptism  and  the  Eucharist  must  be 
administered  in  some  mode ;  there  must  be  rules  about  the  juris- 
diction of  Bishops.    If  there  are  forms  of  prayer  there  must  be 
given  forms.    There  may  also,  of  course,  be  a  number  of  accidents 
which  are  not  necessary,  but  which,  from  particular  reasons,  have 
obtained  sacredness  in  different  parts  of  the  Church,  or  through  the 
whole  of  it.    Now  the  effect  of  the  general  legislation  which  the 
Church  possessed  in  the  early  ages,  was  unquestionably  to  connect 
together  a  particular  mode  of  treating  these  ordinances  with  the 
ordinance  itself.    I  do  not  say  that  this  was  the  wish  of  the  early 
Church ;  on  the  contrary,  I  believe  that  the  study  of  the  proceed- 
ings and  decrees  of  councils  would  lead  us  to  trace  a  very  cautious 
and  often  subtle  wisdom,  in  discriminating  between  that  which  was 
merely  of  needful  ecclesiastical  institution,  and  that  which  was  of 
the  nature  of  the  thing  itself.    And  there  was  a  higher  wisdom 
than  this,  directing  the  practice  of  the  early  Church,  and  actually 
hindering  different  portions,  even  of  such  an  empire  as  the  Roman, 
fn  m  adhering  to  one  ritual  or  one  set  of  observances,  with  that 
fidelity  which  they  observed  in  preserving  the  Creed  and  the  ordi- 
nances.   Still  the  result  of  oecumenical  government  in  some  degree 
to  those  who  lived  then — in  a  much  greater  degree  to  us  who 
merely  read  their  history, — is  to  efface  this  distinction,  and  to  pre- 
vent us  from  contemplating  the  divine  sign  in  its  own  simplicity 


492 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


and  integrity,  as  separate  even  from  the  mos^  desirable  and  indis- 
pensable arrangements  respecting  it. 

When  the  Bishop  of  Rome  tried  to  perpetuate  in  his  own  per- 
son this  oecumenical  legislation,  the  peril  became  infinitely  greater. 
The  most  fearful  confusion  arose  between  the  signs  of  the  Church, 
and  the  ecclesiastical  appointments  which  had  been  devised  to 
make  these  signs  effectual.  Nothing  could  so  obscure  the  divine 
origin  and  constitution  of  the  Church  as  this  confusion.  The 
eagerness  of  the  Church  to  claim  the  power  of  legislating  in 
emergencies  hid  the  fact  from  view,  that  she  was  resting  upon  any 
principles,  or  that  God  had  legislated  for  her.  At  the  same  time 
she  could  not  practically  maintain  a  legislation  which  was  purely 
universal ;  the  habits,  maxims,  and  precedents  of  different  localities 
interfered — only  to  make  the  confusion  of  authorities  and  obli- 
gations more  complete.  Then  came  the  Reformation,  asserting 
the  law  of  God  as  something  paramount  to  the  law  of  the  Church, 
and,  when  its  maxims  were  perverted,  suggesting  to  men  that  their 
wills  or  their  notions  were  superior  to  either.  Meantime,  however, 
the  Church  within  each  nation  had  begun  practically  to  claim 
for  itself  the  power  of  decreeing  rites  and  ceremonies.  That  claim, 
properly  considered  and  used,  was  the  greatest  witness  which  could 
be  borne  against  the  notion  that  Ordinances  and  Ceremonies  are 
the  same.  It  did  homage  to  the  one  as  the  gifts  to  the  Church 
universal ;  it  treated  the  other  as  needful  provisions  to  be  taken 
cognizance  of  by  the  spiritual  body,  this  body  having  at  once  the 
strongest  obligation  to  teach  men  by  outward  evidences  that  they 
were  members  of  one  family,  and  not  to  ppermit  its  own  theories 
or  notions  of  what  was  suitable  to  this  end  to  mix  with  the  great 
principles  of  God's  government.  Various  causes,  however,  inter- 
fered to  mar  the  effect  of  this  proclamation.  As  the  ecclesiastical 
body  in  any  particular  nation  found  itself  checked  by  the  self-will 
of  individuals  unwilling  to  submit  to  the  regulations  which  are 
necessary  to  the  existence  of  every  society,  and  which  acquire  an 
especial  sacredness  in  one  which  is  meant  to  be  the  pattern  of  a  hu- 
man fellowship  ;  it  was  inclined  to  put  forth  its  pretensions  more 
strongly,  and  to  identify  that  which  is  decreed  with  the  very  being 
of  the  Church.    This  temper  was  especially  likely  to  prevail  in 


THE  PATRICIAN. 


493 


nations  which  had  acquired  a  strict  civil  organization,  and  which 
were  continually  exercising  their  powers  of  legislation.  The 
ecclesiastical  body  would  naturally  catch  the  habit  of  looking  upon 
itself  as  merely  existing  to  legislate,  and  would  be  more  proud  of 
the  rules  which  it  was  laying  down  for  its  own  government,  than 
of  all  the  influence  it  was  exerting  upon  the  heart  of  society. 
Supposing  such  a  tone  of  mind  to  become  prevalent,  I  can  conceive 
no  greater  mercy  than  that  the  c; vil  power  should  step  in  to  put  a  stop 
to  clerical  convocations,  or  to  discourage  provincial  synods.  But 
for  such  violence  I  cannot  conceive  how  any  National  Church  could 
have  learnt  what  its  own  peculiar  powers  were.  I  think  it  must 
have  been  crushed  under  the  weight  of  its  own  decrees  ;  and,  above 
all,  that  it  must  have  lost  sight  of  the  only  grounds  of  unity  which 
it  can  have  with  the  members  of  other  nations.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  seems  to  me  that  by  this  discipline  it  has  been  manifested  wherein 
the  substance  and  essence  of  a  national  Church  consists ;  that  its 
substance  is  given  it  by  those  ordinances  which  belong  to  it  in 
common  with  Christians  elsewhere ;  that  its  essence  consists  in 
those  powers  which  belong  to  it  in  common  with  the  different  parts 
of  the  body,  and  which  are  to  be  exerted  in  the  first  place  for  the 
benefit  of  its  own  country.  When  this  lesson  has  been  well  learnt, 
I  have  no  doubt  but  that  each  national  Church  will  recover  its 
synods  and  its  convocations ;  for  then  she  will  know7  how  to  use 
them.  Not  with  the  lust  of  legislation,  not  in  the  hope  of  accom- 
plishing her  chief  objects  by  decrees,  but  for  the  purpose  of  satis- 
fying scruples,  of  leading  men  away  from  the  restless  study  of  what 
is  external,  by  not  compelling  them  to  arrange  and  deliberate  about 
it  for  themselves,  of  determining  those  ceremonies,  which  to  people 
of  a  particular  climate,  character,  and  constitution  best  express  the 
great  ideas  of  the  Church,  of  more  effectually  establishing  and  di- 
recting discipline  and  education,  of  promoting  fellowship  with 
national  Churches  which  are  willing  to  acknowledge  themselves 
as  parts  of  a  great  Catholic  body. 

Whether  when  national  Churches  begin  to  understand  their  own 
position  they  may  not  once  more  send  their  representatives  to  a 
general  council,  and  whether  the  princes  of  the  different  nations 
may  not  feel  such  a  measure  helpful  instead  of  injurious  to  their 
objects,  I  will  not  inquire.    I  see  no  reason  why,  if  we  follow  God's 

32 


494 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


method,  we  may  not  arrive  at  such  a  result,  though  I  can  see  the 
strongest  why  if  we  violate  that  method,  and  seek  to  have  an  in- 
dependent existence,  no  councils,  no  compacts,  no  projects  of  union 
can  ever  be  otherwise  than  evil  in  themselves  and  pregnant  with 
mischief. 

Ought  we  to  say  then,  that  Church  unity  belongs  to  the  first  six 
centuries,  and  that  since  national  distinctions  began,  there  have  been 
no  traces  of  it?  We  have,  I  think,  been  able  to  perceive,  that  the 
separation  of  the  Greek  from  the  Latin  Churches,  which  is  so  fre- 
quently lamented  over,  and  which  ought  to  be  a  great  cause  of 
shame  and  humiliation  to  both,  has,  nevertheless,  led  to  very  blessed 
results,  by  separating  the  Church  from  a  cruel  and  mischievous  ty- 
ranny, and  enabling  it  to  develope  its  powers  under  freer  and  hap- 
pier conditions.  In  like  manner,  if  we  consider  the  subject  calmly 
and  solemnly,  not  omitting  repentance  for  our  sins  nor  thankfulness 
for  our  mercies,  we  shall,  I  believe,  perceive,  that  but  for  the  refor- 
mation in  the  sixteenth  century,  European  society  must  have  sunk 
into  the  condition  of  an  infidel  world,  nominally  ruled  by  the  in- 
triguing head  of  a  little  Italian  principality ;  really  divided  into  a 
number  of  warring  states,  each  aiming  at  the  most  selfish  objects, 
each  only  looking  to  religion  as  the  means  of  accomplishing  them. 
From  that  time  it  has  been  evident  to  thinking  persons,  that  there 
are  two  principles  struggling  in  Christendom  for  supremacy ;  the 
one,  that  which  is  embodied  in  Protestantism,  resisting  the  claim  of 
the  spiritual  power  to  any  extra  national  domination,  and  always 
tending  to  set  at  nought  spiritual  authority  altogether;  the  other, 
that  which  is  embodied  in  Romanism,  resisting  the  attempts  of  the 
particular  states  to  divide  their  own  subjects  from  the  rest  of  Chris- 
tendom, continually  striving  to  uphold  the  Church  as  a  separate 
power,  and  to  set  at  nought  the  existence  of  each  particular  nation. 
These  principles  have  fought  together  in  Europe  for  centuries.  If 
it  be  really  the  purpose  of  God  in  our  age  to  reconcile  them,  and  to 
cast  out  the  element  in  each  which  is  contrary  to  his  will,  and  which 
has  been  introduced  to  it  by  the  perverseness  of  men,  shall  we  whine 
about  the  loss  we  have  sustained  by  not  being  born  at  a  time  when 
the  Church  was  making  its  first  struggling  efforts  to  assert  its  own 
unity  ?  shall  we  not  rejoice  and  give  thanks,  that  we  are  born  in 
these  latter  days  of  the  world,  when  all  things  are  hastening  to  their 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 


495 


consummation,  and  when  the  unity  of  the  Church  shall  be  demon- 
strated to  be  that  ground  upon  which  all  unity  in  nations  and  in  the 
heart  of  man  is  resting? 


SECTION  v. 

THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 

Such  statements  as  these,  however  unacceptable  to  man}'  church- 
men, will  not  avail  to  conciliate  modern  politicians,  or  to  remove 
the  terrors  which  they  entertain  of  ecclesiastical  influence.  Per- 
haps they  will  be  inclined  to  say  that  the  power  which  I  claim  for  the 
spiritual  body  is  really  a  more  dangerous  one  than  that  which  I  re- 
nounce. 'To  admit  the  existence  of  a  dominant  hierarchy  is  the 
necessity  of  a  statesman's  position ;  nay,  he  has  not  much  right  to 
complain  of  the  necessity;  it  helps  in  common  times  to  keep  other 
sects  quiet,  and  clergymen  indifferent.  But  when  you  say  that  this 
hierarchy  is  the  proper  educator  of  the  land,  you  are  not  content 
that  it  should  be  entertained  with  a  bauble.  You  wish  it  to  become 
practically  and  politically  mischievous.  That  power  which  can  ed- 
ucate a  land  must  rule  over  its  families,  over  its  arts,  its  literature, 
its  science,  its  ethics,  its  philosophy,  nay,  in  one  sense,  as  the  head 
of  the  professional  classes,  over  its  law  and  its  medicine.  These 
are  pretensions  which  no  government  in  this  day  can  tolerate  fur- 
ther than  as  it  is  compelled  to  tolerate  them  by  circumstances.  The 
religious  bodies  in  every  country  must  undoubtedly  affect  its  educa- 
tion for  good  or  for  evil ;  but  they  are  happily  broken  into  frag- 
ments, and  it  is  the  statesman's  business  to  see  that  they  act,  one 
and  all  of  them,  as  religious  bodies,  and  in  no  other  character.  The 
general  education  of  the  land  he  must  gradually  (for  unquestiona- 
bly there  are  many  difficulties  from  old  prejudices  and  institutions 
which  he  must  remove  before  he  can  fully  accomplish  his  desire) 
take  under  his  own  direction.  If  he  allows  it  to  be  superintended 
by  any  ecclesiastical  body,  that  body  becomes  just  as  dangerous  as 
the  Jesuits  have  ever  been.  For  where  has  lain  the  real  power  of 
the  Jesuits?  not  in  their  government  over  courts,  but  over  schools; 
not  in  the  poison  they  have  been  able  to  infuse  into  the  ears  of 
monarchs,  half  so  much  as  in  the  maxims  of  ecclesiastical  submis- 


496 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


sion  and  craft  which  they  have  communicated  to  children  along 
with  their  primers  and  their  grammars.' 

In  the  first  division  of  this  work  I  have  endeavoured  to  trace 
the  history  of  some  of  those  political  and  philosophical  movements, 
which  have  led  men  in  our  day  to  contemplate  education  as  the  only 
adequate  means  of  preserving  government  and  society.  I  showed 
that  the  course  of  thought  by  which  we  had  arrived  at  this  opinion, 
was  altogether  at  variance  with  the  practical  results  to  which  it 
seemed  to  be  leading.  The  statesman  demands  education  as  a 
power  for  acting  upon  the  spirits  of  men.  But  the  statesman  of 
our  day  has  distinctly  and  formally  repudiated  the  notion  that  he 
can  deal  with  the  spirits  of  men  ;  he  has  blamed  his  forefathers  for 
assuming  any  such  authority.  It  seemed  to  us,  therefore,  that  when 
the  statesman  claimed  himself  to  be  the  educator  of  his  land,  he 
was  involved  in  a  strange  contradiction.  Yet  it  was  a  contradic- 
tion into  which  he  had  fallen  most  naturally.  He  found  that  a  set 
of  warring  religious  bodies  were  not  competent  to  exercise  the  kind 
of  influence  over  his  subjects  which  he  feels  to  be  necessary  for 
them.  He  wants  them  to  be  united  and  harmonized ;  a  sect-educa- 
tor sets  them  at  strife.  He  will  therefore  do  what  he  can.  He  will 
leave  to  these  religious  bodies  the  right  of  teaching  their  own  dog- 
mas ;  whatever  else  is  included  in  the  idea  of  education  must  be 
taken  under  his  own  immediate  cognizance.  And  this  course,  awk- 
ward and  inconvenient  as  it  evidently  is,  nay,  destructive  of  the  very 
idea  of  education,  seemed  to  us  the  only  one  which  is  left  for  the 
modern  statesman,  unless  there  were  some  spiritual  body  existing 
in  the  heart  of  his  nation,  which  was  as  organic  as  the  civil  body, 
and  able  to  perform  those  functions  which  by  its  own  confession  it 
is  incompetent  to  perform.  Our  subsequent  inquiries  have  led  us 
to  believe  that  there  is  such  a  body ;  that  it  has  established  itself 
in  the  heart  of  every  European  nation ;  that  it  has  been  the  teacher 
of  every  nation ;  that  it  has  incorporated  itself  with  the  civil  soci- 
ety ;  that  the  statesman  finds  the  society  with  which  he  has  to  deal 
everywhere  bearing  witness  of  its  existence ;  that  he  is  obliged  to 
depose  this  body  from  its  functions  before  he  can  commence  school- 
master himself.  Such  is  the  state  of  the  question  at  present.  I 
shall  not  enter  into  it  at  large,  because  it  has  been  discussed  else- 
where.   But  it  is  necessary  for  our  present  purpose,  that  I  should 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN.  497 

offer  some  indications  of  the  difference  between  the  effects  of  an 
education  given  by  a  national  Church  which  understands  its  own 
powers  and  responsibilities,  and  one  given,  first,  by  the  state;  sec- 
ondly, by  a  set  of  different  sects ;  thirdly,  by  an  ecclesiastical  extra- 
national order,  like  that  of  the  Jesuits.  That  I  may  follow  the 
method  in  which  I  have  supposed  the  objections  to  arise,  I  will 
speak  very  shortly  of  these  kinds  of  education  as  they  affect  family 
life,  science,  art  and  literature,  popular  ethics,  and  philosophy. 

L  1.  I  have  already  had  occasion  to  speak  more  than  once  on 
the  first  of  these  subjects.  I  have  shown  that  a  mere  religious 
body,  such  as  that  of  the  Quakers,  of  the  Calvinists,  &c,  though  it 
may  regard  family  life  with  reverence,  though,  at  certain  stages  of 
its  existence,  it  may  even  have  preserved  family  life  in  great  purity, 
cannot  connect  the  institution  of  the  family,  as  such,  with  its  re- 
ligion. The  religious  man  is  one  who  chooses  for  himself ;  who 
at  a  certain  time  has  been  led  to  seek  for  a  new  life,  and  a  new 
fellowship  expressive  of  this  new  life.  Such  is  the  notion  in  which 
a  sect  begins.  It  becomes  exceedingly  modified  when  the  sect 
has  established  itself.  Hereditary  feelings  and  sympathies  develope 
themselves  ;  to  desert  the  faith  of  forefathers  begins  to  be  spoken 
of  as  an  evil.  But  still  the  religious  society  subsists  upon  this 
principle.  Those  who  are  admitted  into  its  privileges  do  not 
grow  into  them.  The  religious  body  is  looked  upon  as  something 
different  in  kind  from  the  family.  And  therefore  it  is  the  com- 
mon complaint  in  all  sects,  that  wherever  the  hereditary  habit  has 
begun  to  prevail,  the  religion  becomes  a  matter  of  course,  its 
power  is  exhausted  ;  some  violent  efforts  must  be  made  to  revive  it. 
Now  such  influences  as  these,  I  maintain,  cannot  by  possibility 
cultivate  the  family  life  of  a  nation.  They  do  not  bring  the  spir- 
itual life  into  any  direct  relation  with  the  life  of  natural  kinsman- 
ship.  And  in  a  day  when  so  many  influences  are  threatening- 
household  sanctities,  when  so  many  schemes  of  universal  society 
exist  which  cast  them  aside  altogether,  the  statesman  who  has  no 
better  means  of  protecting  them  than  that  which  is  afforded  by  the 
teaching  of  religious  sects,  must  be  prepared  to  see  them  perish 
altogether.  Where  there  are  no  political  influences  and  motives 
at  work,  no  trade-temper,  no  grand  philosophical  generalizations, 
the  religious  men  in  the  sects  may  hope  to  keep  alive  the  habit 


498 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


of  respect  and  attachment  among  their  children.  Where  these 
are  abroad,  they  must  tremble ;  at  all  events,  he  who  believes  that 
the  existence  of  the  nation  depends  upon  the  preservation  of  do- 
mestic relations,  must  tremble  if  these  be  their  only  guardians. 

2.  But  what  can  the  statesman  himself  do  by  his  education  to 
protect  these  relations  ?  Nothing  whatever.  Ought  I  not  rather 
to  say,  that  of  necessity  he  must  do  much  to  shake  the  confidence 
in  them,  and  to  impair  their  sacredness  ?  It  is  no  fault  of  his,  it 
is  the  necessity  of  his  position,  a  part  of  his  duty  that  he  should  aim 
at  making  men  citizens.  He  cannot  teach  them  to  be  sons  and 
brothers,  he  is  obliged  to  interfere  with  the  duties  which  belong  to 
them  in  these  capacities.  He  must  have  his  schools  established 
upon  the  express  principle,  that  the  parents  are  not  competent  to 
teach,  or  to  choose  teachers  themselves.  He  must  treat  the  author- 
ity of  the  father  as  if  its  sacredness  depended  upon  the  authority 
of  the  law.  All  wise  statesmen  of  antiquity  felt  this  difficulty,  and 
rejoiced  to  avail  themselves  of  such  means  as  they  had  of  escap- 
ing from  it.  Modern  statesmen  should  surely  ask  themselves  with 
some  earnestness,  whether  any  helps  for  this  purpose  are  within 
their  reach. 

3.  That  the  Jesuit  is  not  exactly  the  person  to  whom  one  can 
safely  coufide  the  custody  of  family  life  and  relations,  most  of  the 
persons  with  whom  I  am  now  arguing  will  acknowledge.  And 
perhaps  they  will  agree  with  me  in  thinking,  nay,  may  wonder 
that  I  should  make  such  a  concession,  that  the  evil  of  the  Jesuit's 
influence  does  not  arise  solely,  or  perhaps  chiefly,  from  the  particu- 
lar opinions  which  he  inculcates — that  if  there  could  be  a  Protest- 
ant order  of  the  same  kind,  it  would  be  almost  equally  mischiev- 
ous. And  wherein,  then,  upon  my  principle,  does  its  evil  consist  1 
Precisely  in  this ;  1  believe  God  has  established  a  universal  Church 
in  the  world,  which  grew  out  of  a  family,  which  embodies  the 
idea  of  family  life  in  its  highest  possible  expansion.  That  idea, 
I  believe,  is  preserved  in  freshness  and  reality,  just  so  long  as  a  strict 
unbroken  connexion  is  kept  up  between  it  highest  form  and  its 
lowest ;  so  long  as  the  application  of  the  word  Father  to  Him  who 
was,  who  is,  and  who  is  to  come,  is  felt  to  be  no  figurative  abuse, 
but  rather  the  only  possible  explanation  of  its  most  ordinary  ap- 
plication.   And  I  believe  that  Ignatius  Loyola  established  a  uni- 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 


499 


versal  order  of  his  own  upon  a  principle  altogether  different  from 
this  divine  principle,  nay,  subversive  of  it ;  that  such  an  order  cannot 
be  the  means  of  preserving  any  part  of  the  true  constitution  of  soci- 
ety; that  it  must  be  continually  interfering  with  it,  and  substitut- 
ing something  else  in  the  place  of  it :  that,  above  all,  family  order 
and  this  pseudo  ecclesiastical  order  must  be  perpetual,  irreconcila- 
ble enemies. 

4.  If  this  be  the  case,  I  need  not  spend  any  words  in  proving 
that  the  spiritual  and  universal  society  of  which  we  have  dis- 
covered the  signs,  seeing  that  it  assumes  the  family  to  be  taken 
by  baptism  into  God's  family,  seeing  that  it  supposes  all  civil  duties 
and  relations  to  grow  naturally  out  of  these  first  duties  and  rela- 
tions, and  seeing  that  it  looks  upon  the  highest  ecclesiastical  duties 
and  relations  as  connected  with  the  ordinary  social  duties,  should  be 
the  great  instrument  for  accomplishing  that  object  which  divided 
sects,  the  civil  power,  a  seemingly  universal  fellowship  cannot  ac- 
complish, that  of  building  up  and  sanctifying  the  domestic  society 
of  every  nation. 

II.  1.  How  far  religious  bodies  or  sects  can  be  trusted  with  the 
scientific  education  of  a  nation,  may  be  judged  from  the  difference 
of  the  feelings  with  which  they  have  regarded  science  at  different 
stages  of  their  history.  Almost  without  exception,  the  impulse  of 
every  sect,  when  its  religious  faith  and  sympathies  were  most 
strong,  has  been  to  look  at  science  as  something  wholly  alien  from 
the  nature  of  faith,  and  not  to  be  reconciled  with  it.  Whether  this 
has  arisen  from  a  Manichean  horror  of  the  outward  world,  or  from 
a  dread  of  it  as  something  too  holy  to  be  touched,  or  merely  from 
a  dislike  of  the  slow  and  cold  methods  by  which  a  knowledge  of 
its  secrets  is  obtained,  or,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Quakers,  from  a  cer- 
tain dim  intuition  of  a  link  between  the  laws  of  physical  and 
spiritual  investigation  which  ordinary  philosophers  had  over- 
looked, the  result  has  been  the  same.  In  a  generation  or  two  the 
case  becomes  altogether  changed,  at  least  to  all  outward  appear- 
ance. Persons  arise  out  of  these  sects  who  show  a  genius  for 
physical  speculation,  and  devote  themselves  wholly  to  it ;  a  notion 
pervades  the  members  of  the  body  generally  that  such  pursuits  can  no 
longer  be  discouraged,  as  they  were  in  the  days  of  their  fathers;  a  few 
sturdy  Protestants  still  remain  to  warn  younger  men  against  perils 


500 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


which  a  sure  instinct  tells  them  are  most  real ;  others  who  fancy 
themselves  more  wise  and  enlightened,  and  yet  withal  very  reli- 
gious, explain  what  lessons  respecting  the  Divine  wisdom  and  good- 
ness may  be  gathered  from  natural  discoveries.  This  last  change 
strikes  some  as  a  very  promising  one ;  to  me  it  seems  that  the  old 
state  of  things  was  far  better.  The  old  teachers  were  acting  out 
a  principle ;  they  believed  that  the  business  of  man's  life  is  to  ac- 
quaint himself  with  his  Creator  and  to  do  his  will ;  they  did  not 
see  what  these  studies  had  to  do  with  this  great  end,  therefore 
they  rejected  them.  Their  descendants,  when  they  first  enter 
upon  these  pursuits,  do  not  complain  that  the  application  of  the 
maxim  was  narrow;  they  complain  that  the  maxim  itself  was 
narrow ;  that  men,  if  they  attend  properly  to  their  religious 
duties,  may  bestow  a  fair  portion  of  their  time  upon  pursuits  which 
have  a  different  aim  and  motive.  Soon  of  course  these  pursuits  are  felt 
to  be  genuine  and  real,  the  religious  duties  artificial  and  traditional ; 
if  the  former  are  not  wholly  followed  and  the  latter  neglected, 
there  is, 'at  all  events,  no  sympathy  between  them.  Then  if  there 
should  come  a  religious  revival,  and  the  feelings  which  are  embo- 
died in  the  different  sects  should  be  able  to  influence  public  opinion, 
and  to  create  what  is  called  a  religious  world,  the  expedient  is  re- 
sorted to,  of  making  sciences  tell  a  tale  about  the  truth  of  the 
Scriptures  and  the  being  and  attributes  of  God.  A  moral  is  wrung 
out  of  its  facts,  by  fair  means  or  by  foul,  often  by  most  dishonest  con- 
struction of  evidence,  often  by  positive  suppression  of  that  which 
has  been  proved.  If  any  fact  is  brought  to  light  which  opposes  a 
current  notion  in  theology  or  a  current  interpretation  of  the  Scrip- 
tures, it  must  not  be  fairly  looked  at ;  the  question  is  raised  whether 
there  ought  to  be  such  a  fact,  and,  therefore,  whether  we  may  re- 
cognise it  supposing  it  should  be  one.  The  scientific  men  are  right- 
ly disgusted.  They  see  that  not  only  the  cause  of  science  but  also 
of  honesty  is  at  stake,  they  begin  to  suspect  an  hypothesis  the  more 
for  its  gratifying  religious  feelings. 

2.  And  here  comes  in  the  civil  power,  and  sa)s,  *  This  we  can- 
not permit ;  our  subjects  must  be  taught  science  fairly  and  truly. 
We  must  have  railways  and  steam-engines.  In  the  present  state 
of  society,  our  very  handicraftsmen  must  understand  something  of 
the  regulations  of  that  machinery  which  they  have  to  work ;  the 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 


501 


knowledge  of  a  multitude  of  subjects  unknown  to  their  ancestors 
is  needful  for  them  ;  you  religious  men  may  impart  wmat  correc- 
tions or  draw  what  inferences  you  please,  we  must  teach  the  things, 
we  must  give  our  countrymen  a  scientific  culture.' 

I  have  nothing  to  say  in  answer  to  this  determination,  but  that 
I  believe  it  will  defeat  itself.  This  teaching  of  a  multitude  of  things 
is  not,  I  fancy,  scientific  culture,  but  is  fatal  to  it.  The  favourite 
name  with  those  who  defend  this  sort  of  education  is  the  name  of 
Bacon.  0  that  they  would  devote  some  real  pains  to  the  study  of 
Bacon!  They  would  find  him  denouncing  as  one  of  the  main  hin- 
derances  to  scientific  knowledge  and  scientific  progress,  the  desire 
for  facts  which  should  be  "  fructiferous"  and  not  "  luciferous,"  which 
should  lead  to  mere  results,  and  not  to  the  search  for  higher  princi- 
ples. The  whole  object  of  his  writings  was  to  teach  how  in  facts 
one  may  seek  for  laws  ;  not  how,  out  of  a  heap  of  observations,  one 
may  make  first  a  theory  and  then  a  machine.  To  the  passion  for 
mere  effects,  and  what  are  called  practical  results,  he  attributed 
most  of  the  delusions  and  crimes  of  the  alchemists.  And  unques- 
tionably; if  he  were  to  reappear  in  our  day,  and  were  to  hear  him- 
self eulogized  as  the  man  who  had  taught  how  much  nobler  a  thing 
it  is  to  make  shoes  than  to  seek  for  principles,  he  wrould  believe 
that  the  very  mischiefs  out  of  which  he  had  been  the  means  of  de- 
livering his  countrymen,  were  coming  back  upon  them  through  the 
abuse  of  his  own  wisdom.  Yet  this  is  the  doctrine  which  the  states- 
man, who  is  merely  a  statesman,  does  inevitably  adopt ;  this  has 
ever  been  and  must  ever  be  the  maxim  of  a  state  education. 

3.  The  Jesuits  cannot  be  accused  of  neglecting  to  give  informa- 
tion on  physical  subjects  to  their  scholars.  Nor  does  it  appear  that 
they  attempted  to  restore  old  theories  on  these  matters,  or  to  teach 
any  other  opinions  than  those  which  had  the  general  sanction  of 
philosophers  in  their  day.  As  the  Dominicans  and  the  Francis- 
cans were  the  means  of  reversing  the  papal  decree  against  Aristo- 
tle, so  it  seems  as  if  the  Jesuits  had  practically  reversed  the  decree 
against  Galileo,  rather  eagerly  availing  themselves  of  the  direction 
which  men's  minds  were  taking  towrards  physical  inquiries,  to  turn 
them  away  from  inquiries  into  subjects  more  immediately  concern- 
ing themselves.  Here,  as  everywhere,  their  instruction  proceeded 
upon  one  principle,  and  in  one  regular,  coherent  system.  Teach 


502 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


every  thing,  be  it  physics,  history,  or  philosophy,  in  such  wise  that 
the  student  shall  feel  he  is  not  apprehending  a  truth,  but  only  re- 
ceiving a  maxim  upon  trust,  or  studying  a  set  of  probabilities.  Act- 
ing upon  this  rule,  they  could  publish  an  edition  of  the  "  Principia," 
mentioning  that  the  main  doctrine  of  it  had  been  denounced  by  the 
Pope,  and  was  therefore  to  be  rejected ;  but,  at  the  same  time,  re- 
commending the  study  of  the  book  as  containing  a  series  of  very 
ingenious  arguments  and  apparent  demonstrations.  There  was  no 
curl  of  the  lip  in  this  utterance,  strange  as  it  may  seem  to  us,  nor, 
in  the  sense  we  commonly  give  to  the  word,  any  dishonesty.  The 
editors  did  not  believe  that  Newton  had  proved  his  point.  They 
had  not  enough  of  the  feeling  of  certainty  in  their  minds,  to  think 
that  any  thing  could  be  proved.  All  is  one  sea  of  doubts,  perplexi- 
ties, possibilities ;  the  great  necessity  is  to  feel  that  wre  cannot  ar- 
rive at  truth,  and  that  therefore  we  must  submit  ourselves  to  an  in- 
fallible authority.  This  was  the  habit  of  their  mind ;  whether  it 
was  a  true  one  or  no  the  religious  man  will  be  able  to  resolve  when 
he  has  considered  its  effects  in  producing  the  skepticism  of  the 
eighteenth  century ;  the  scientific  man,  when  he  thinks  how  hope- 
less of  progression  those  who  cherish  it  must  be. 

4.  Now  a  national  Church,  which  believes  that  it  exists  for  the 
purpose  of  cultivating  the  inner  man,  just  as  the  civil  power  exists 
for  the  sake  of  the  outward  man — which  believes  that  it  has  a  com- 
mission and  vocation  for  this  end, — must  be  a  continual  witness 
against  all  these  notions  of  education.  She  cannot  tolerate  for  an 
instant  the  sectarian  notion,  that  the  study  of  the  laws  according  to 
which  God  has  framed  this  universe  is  not  a  solemn  and  religious 
work,  to  be  carried  on  reverently,  in  connexion  with  the  study  of 
the  laws  upon  which  He  has  constructed  the  moral  universe.  As 
she  believes  that  there  is  a  method  for  arriving  at  the  knowledge 
of  the  one  constitution,  so  she  believes  that  there  is  a  method  for 
arriving  at  the  knowledge  of  the  other.  There  may  be  a  connexion 
between  these  two  methods,  but  they  cannot  be  the  same.  The 
spiritual  method  is  not  honoured  when  you  compel  the  physical 
facts  into  obedience  to  it ;  you  are  certain  they  cannot  contradict 
it ;  you  are  sure  they  will,  at  all  events,  illustrate  it  ten  thousand 
fold  more  than  all  your  moralities  about  them  ever  can.  A  national 
Church  must  believe  in  the  highest  sense  that  what  is  is  right. 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 


503 


This  is  the  pillar  of  her  own  existence  ;  this  is  what  she  opposes  to 
the  maxim  of  the  world,  that  things  are  right  which  we  make  so 
by  our  rules  and  conventions ;  therefore  she  must  teach  her  chil- 
dren to  ask  bravely  and  boldly,  "  What  is  V  encouraging  them  by 
all  means  to  expect  an  answer ;  teaching  them  in  what  frame  of 
mind  to  wait  for  it,  to  receive  it,  to  give  thanks  for  it. 

But  this  lesson  is  very  unlike  that  one  which  the  civil  power 
seeks  to  inculcate  in  its  education.  The  spiritual  teacher  in  his  own 
sphere  is  occupied  in  leading  men  into  the  secret  heart  of  things,  in 
teaching  them  the  laws  of  their  own  being,  and  their  direct  relation 
to  the  Creator.  In  this  sphere  of  physical  science  he  must  act  upon 
the  same  principle.  He  cannot  merely  teach  facts  and  opinions,  he 
must  seek  to  guide  his  pupil  into  the  knowledge  of  laws.  This 
method  he  will  follow  with  the  higher  or  professional  classes  who 
are  submitted  to  his  discipline.  He  cannot  change  it,  though  he 
may  alter  altogether  his  scheme  of  instruction  when  he  is  occupied 
with  the  lowest  classes.  For  these,  too,  consist  of  men  ;  of  men  who 
want  to  know,  and  who  have  a  right  to  know  what  that  order  is  in 
which  they  are  placed;  what  the  meaning  of  the  things  which  they 
are  doing  is ;  who  must  not  merely  be  taught  what  they  are  to  do, 
or  merely  be  furnished  with  rules  for  doing  it. 

And  therefore  it  is  almost  needless  to  say,  that  such  a  teacher 
looks  upon  authority,  not  in  the  way  in  which  the  Jesuit  does,  as  a 
substitute  for  truth,  but  as  that  which  is  to  put  us  in  the  right  way 
of  searching  after  it.  A  national  Church  believes  that  she  is  set  in 
the  midst  of  a  nation  by  Him, 6  who  for  this  end  was  born,  and  for 
this  end  came  into  the  world,  that  He  might  bear  witness  to  the 
truth,'  in  order  that  she  may  bear  witness  of  it ;  and  may  rebuke 
the  slavish  and  godless  tempers  which  hinder  men  in  any  direction 
from  coveting  it ;  and  that  by  leading  them  to  know  it  she  may 
make  them  free. 

III.  The  treatment  which  literature  and  art  are  likely  to  receive 
from  these  different  classes  may  be  conjectured  from  the  remarks 
which  have  been  just  made.  Sects  in  their  infancy  reject  both  as 
worldly  and  heathenish,  in  their  manhood  and  decline  tolerate  them 
as  necessary  indulgences,  or  endeavour  to  make  them  religious  by 
sugaring  them  over  with  a  Christian  phraseology.  The  civil  power 
encourages  both,  because  they  furnish  certain  measures  of  diver- 


504 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


sion  and  entertainment  to  different  classes  of  the  community ;  but 
determines  their  value  by  the  degree  in  which  they  minister  to  im- 
mediate utility.  The  Jesuit  favours  all  that  kind  of  literary  dili- 
gence which  exhibits  itself  in  laborious  compilations,  annals, 
chronologies,  &c. ;  all  that  kind  of  art  which  may  help  to  connect 
devotion  more  closely  with  the  senses.  So  that  in  each  of  these 
forms  of  education  there  is,  from  different  causes,  the  same  tenden- 
cy to  give  to  human  utterances,  whether  in  books,  or  pictures,  or 
sculpture,  or  music,  or  architecture,  an  artificial,  outward,  fictitious 
character ;  to  make  them  insincere  expressions  of  that  which  is  ac- 
tually in  the  hearts  of  men  ;  or  else  to  make  those  hearts  themselves 
insincere,  by  leading  them  constantly  to  aim  at  the  production  of 
some  effect  to  which  the  names,  "  moral,  useful,  religious,"  by  a 
great  abuse  of  language  are  applied.  But  if  there  be  any  body 
which  really  believes  that  it  has  a  commission  to  cultivate  the  mind 
and  spirit  of  a  nation ;  to  call  forth  in  it  that  which  is  truest  and 
noblest ;  to  awaken  the  reason,  the  understanding,  the  affections  ; 
to  give  them  their  key  note,  to  bring  out  their  different  harmonies  ; 
such  a  body  will  feel  that  the  men  to  whom  God  has  given  the 
power  of  expressing  their  own  minds  and  the  minds  of  their  age, 
whether  in  words  or  in  sensible  forms,  have  a  high  vocation  and  a 
mighty  responsibility;  that  the  influences  of  the  world  are  likely  to 
choke  their  powers  and  prevent  them  from  freely  and  happily  ex- 
panding ;  that  the  spiritual  mother  is  to  brood  over  them  with  ten- 
der and  affectionate  care ;  to  cheer  them  on  amid  outward  and  in- 
ward discouragements ;  to  give  them  the  soothing  food  and  medi- 
cine of  peaceful  devotions  and  outwTard  images  of  serenity  and  quiet- 
ness ;  to  stir  them  up  by  heroical  examples,  to  make  them  conscious 
of  their  relation  to  the  past  and  the  future ;  to  hold  forth  high  and 
distant  ends,  that  they  may  not  be  crushed  by  the  influences  of  their 
age,  or  be  tempted  to  court  its  approbation  ;  to  humble  them  that 
they  may  be  exalted ;  to  teach  them  how  they  may  discover  the 
invisible  in  the  visible,  instead  of  confounding  them  and  bringing 
the  higher  under  the  conditions  of  the  lower.  While  thus  training 
the  more  illustrious  citizens  of  the  commonwealth,  she  is  really 
marking  out  the  course  by  which  all  should  be  trained  who  are  to 
be  citizens  indeed ;  for  to  each  God  has  committed  some  trust, 
which  may  be  fulfilled  for  his  glory  and  for  the  good  of  the  land. 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 


505 


IV.  1.  I  will  conclude  this  subject  with  a  few  words  upon  the 
subject  of  ethics.  Strictly  speaking,  the  sectarian  does  not  recog- 
nise the  existence  of  such  a  study.  For  he  looks  upon  the  religious 
man  as  taken  into  a  position  altogether  different  from  that  which 
other  men  occupy.  He  and  they  are  not  under  the  same  law. 
There  is  a  set  of  rules  and  maxims  which  they  must  observe,  in 
order  that  they  may  be  members  of  the  family  and  citizens  of 
the  community  to  which  they  belong.  The  religious  man  submits 
to  these,  but  he  is  subject  to  another  set  of  Gospel  influences,  with 
which  the  ordinary  man  has  nothing  to  do.  Christian  ethics  mean 
the  religion  of  the  heart  according  to  the  Bible,  they  apply  only  to 
the  converted ;  worldly  ethics  mean  the  regulation  of  the  conduct 
according  to  the  rules  and  maxims  which  are  received  among 
worldly  men,  these  apply  to  the  unconverted.  Upon  this  showing 
a  morality  for  man  as  man  does  not  exist. 

2.  Accordingly  the  statesman  interferes,  and  says  in  this  case  as 
in  the  others,  *  Then  you  shall  teach  that  morality  which  belongs 
to  your  position  ;  I  will  teach  that  which  belongs  to  mine.  Men 
must  acknowledge  some  rule  of  life.  These  subjects  of  mine,  call 
them  converted  or  unconverted,  must  be  trained  to  some  sense  of 
their  relations  to  each  other.  Mere  legal  penalties  are  not  suffi- 
cient for  them,  they  must  be  taught  some  reason  for  their  conduct, 
some  method  of  self-government.'  Of  course  these  reasons  and 
these  methods  must  turn  upon  maxims  of  self-interest.  How  can 
they  turn  upon  any  other  maxims?  The  statesman  has  been 
warned  off  the  religious  ground,  this  is  all  that  remains  to  him. 

3.  Of  Jesuit  ethics  I  need  not  speak  at  length,  they  are 
in  sufficiently  bad  odour  among  us,  and  probably  in  most  nations 
of  the  Continent.  What  I  wish  to  remark  is,  that  all  the  evil 
which  is  in  them  has  flowed  from  that  first  principle  of  establish- 
ing an  universal  order  upon  a  human  calculation  of  what  is  ex- 
pedient for  the  preservation  of  the  Church  and  of  religion.  Once 
construct  a  society  of  such  power  and  of  such  coherency  as  the  Jesuit 
society,  and  it  is  impossible,  in  the  nature  of  things,  that  the  preserva- 
tion of  this  order  should  not  begin  to  be  regarded  as  the  one  great  end, 
to  which  every  other  is  subordinate.  To  keep  this  great  machine  in 
motion,  to  make  it  effective,  every  thing  must  be  sacrificed.  I  do 
not  think  that  there  is  one  pernicious  maxim  in  the  Institute  which 


506 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


may  not  be  legitimately  deduced  from  this  primary  assumption.  The 
Jesuits  feel,  about  morality,  as  about  science,  not  that  it  is,  but 
that  it  has  been  made,  and,  therefore,  that  it  may  be  remade  for  a 
higher  object.  The  world  has  framed  its  maxims  in  order  to  keep 
itself  alive  ;  he  may  frame  his  maxims  in  order  to  keep  the  holy 
religious  order  alive.  The  object  is  surely  better ;  the  ways  in 
both  cases  are  determined  by  arrangement  and  convention. 

4.  Once  again,  I  say  a  national  Church  exists  to  protest  against 
these  outrages  upon  that  which  is  the  very  ground  of  a  nation's 
existence.  It  affirms  morality  to  be  universal,  in  its  highest  form 
to  be  meant  for  all  men  and  to  be  attainable  by  all  men,  seeing 
that  the  covenant  of  Baptism  takes  all  who  will  receive  it  into  the 
highest  state  which  a  man  on  earth  can  enjoy;  the  state  in  which 
he  has  all  helps  for  resisting  the  powers  of  the  flesh,  the  world, 
and  the  devil,  which  are  seeking  to  rob  him  of  his  human  privilege. 
It  affirms  morality  to  be  in  direct  opposition  to  selfishness,  not  in 
its  highest  forms  merely,  but  in  its  lowest;  the  penalties  of  the 
lawgiver,  the  prayers  of  the  Church,  being  alike  directed  against 
this  sin ;  one  denouncing  its  outward  effects,  the  other  aiming  at 
the  extirpation  of  the  internal  disease.  It  declares  morality,  not  in 
its  highest  forms  only  but  in  its  lowest,  to  be  grounded  upon  the 
character  and  will  of  God  ;  subjection  to  that  will  being  the  lesson 
inculcated  by  the  law,  conformity  to  that  character  being  the 
effect  produced  by  the  power  of  the  Gospel.  And,  therefore,  of 
necessity  it  must  hate  and  curse  all  such  schemes  of  morality  as 
the  Jesuits  have  sanctioned  ;  schemes  which  pervert  the  truth,  that 
each  individual  case  has  peculiar  points  and  delicate  complications 
of  its  own  which  require  wisdom  and  refinement  and  a  freedom 
from  rash  habits  of  judging  in  the  person  who  deals  in  them,  into 
the  confounding  doctrine  that  there  is  no  common  law  of  right  and 
wrong,  or  that  no  conscience  for  perceiving  that  law  exists  in  the 
creatures  to  whom  it  is  addressed. 

I  have  but  two  remarks  to  make  before  I  conclude  this  head  of 
my  subject.  The  first  is,  that  I  believe  all  the  defects  in  national 
Churches,  and  in  the  education  which  they  have  communicated, 
may  be  traced  to  a  notion  which  has  prevailed  far  too  generally  in 
the  members  and  ministers  of  them ;  either  that  their  position  is 
sectarian,  that  they  are  merely  civil  bodies  constructed  for  certain 


THE  MODERN  STATESMAN. 


507 


civil  ends ;  or,  on  the  other  hand,  that  they  are  merely  parts  of  a 
religious  society  or  order  existing  for  purposes  wholly  foreign  to 
those  for  which  the  civil  power  exists.  Should  therefore  any  op- 
ponent produce  facts  which  illustrate  the  weakness  and  inefficiency 
of  these  Churches,  or  of  any  one  of  them,  I  shall  be  most  willing 
to  consider  his  statements.  I  am  satisfied  they  will  all  tend  to 
the  confirmation  of  mine,  that  they  will  all  tend  to  prove  the  inherent 
viciousness  of  those  schemes  of  education  which  have  at  different 
periods  suggested  themselves  as  most  plausible  and  satisfactory, 
that  they  will  furnish  another  reason  why  every  national  Church 
should  understand  its  own  high  position,  and  should  zealously  assert 
it.  My  other  remark  is  addressed  to  the  statesman.  He  has  felt  in 
most  countries  of  Europe,  he  feels  still,  the  peril  of  Jesuit  influence, 
and  the  necessity  of  guarding  himself  against  it.  But  what  can 
he  do  ?  If  he  tries  to  get  rid  of  the  idea  that  there  is  one  Catholic 
Church  in  the  world,  and  treats  religion  as  if  it  were  merely  a 
matter  of  private  sectarian  opinion,  he  will  not  hinder  the  Jesuits 
from  entering  his  dominions  and  becoming  masters  of  his  schools. 
His  tolerant  maxims  will  make  their  settlement  more  easv ;  the 
earnest  cry  which  will  be  raised  throughout  a  land  left  to  sectarian 
influence  for  some  united  body,  some  organic  fellowship,  will  cause 
their  appearance  to  be  hailed  with  delight.  Will  he,  then,  in 
despair  resort  to  his  own  peculiar  powers  ?  Will  he  proscribe 
and  banish  the  intruders,  or  put  them  to  death  ?  These  methods, 
he  knows,  have  been  tried  and  tried  in  vain  ;  the  crushed  order 
has  risen  with  all  its  other  influences  made  stronger  by  the  credit  of 
persecution  and  of  martyrdom.  One  barrier,  and  one  alone,  this 
subtle  and  Protean  society  knows  that  it  cannot  break  through.  A 
national  Church,  strong  in  the  conviction  of  its  own  distinct  pow- 
ers, paying  respectful  homage  to  those  of  the  state,  educating  all 
classes  to  be  citizens  by  making  them  men ;  this  is  a  spectacle 
which  the  Jesuit  regards  with  wonder  and  despair.  W7here  there  is 
such  a  national  Church  he  may  be  safely  allowed  to  walk  up  and 
down  in  the  land ;  the  sting  of  his  order  is  taken  away;  he  may 
become  a  worthy  and  respectable  member  of  the  commonwealth. 
If  the  statesman  be  convinced  that  the  maiming  and  ultimate  sup- 
pression of  such  a  Church  is  the  true  object  of  his  policy,  he  must 
invent  some  new  charm  for  laying  this  enemy.  None  has  yet  been 
discovered. 


508 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


SECTION  VI. 
THE  MODERN  INTERPRETERS  OF  PROPHECY. 

There  is  one  class  of  persons  for  whom  I  entertain  a  sincere 
respect,  who  may,  I  fear,  be  offended  by  some  of  these  observations : 
I  allude  to  the  modern  interpreters  of  Prophecy.  First,  they  will 
think  that  while  I  have  professed  great  reverence  for  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, as  containing  the  national  history  of  the  Jews,  I  have  over- 
looked one  of  its  most  remarkable  features,  its  promise  of  perma- 
nence and  restoration  to  God's  ancient  people  ;  that  hereby  I  have 
shown  an  indifference  to  the  words  of  inspiration,  and  a  preference 
for  my  own  theories.  2dly,  They  will  say  that  my  notion  of  a 
divine  constitution  already  established,  which  is  not  merely  spi- 
ritual and  universal  but  national,  practically  sets  aside  the  doctrine 
of  the  second  coming  of  Him  who  is  to  make  all  things  new. 
3rdly,  That  when  I  have  spoken  of  the  Romish  system  as  distinct 
from  the  Latin  Church,  I  have  overlooked  the  clear  declarations  of 
the  divine  word  respecting  the  judgments  upon  the  apostasy  and 
the  ultimate  excision  of  all  bodies  wThich  belong  to  it. 

1.  I  agree  with  those  who  look  forward  to  a  national  restora- 
tion of  the  Jews,  that  much  of  the  language  which  is  commonly 
applied  to  their  views,  is  the  result  of  prejudice  and  misapprehen- 
sion. I  do  not,  for  instance,  understand  what  is  meant  by  the  word 
'  carnaV  when  it  is  used  in  connexion  with  the  doctrine,  that  other 
privileges  exist  besides  those  which  belong  to  the  Church  as  a  spi- 
ritual body,  and  that  of  these  the  Jews  were  formerly  and  shall  be 
hereafter  the  possessors.  If  I  am  right,  these  privileges  are  just  as 
necessary  witnesses  against  carnality  (when  by  carnality  is  meant 
the  inclination  of  that  flesh  which  is  not  subject  to  the  law  of  God, 
neither  indeed  can  be),  as  those  which  directly  appertain  to  us  as 
children  of  God  and  inheritors  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven  ;  nay,  in 
one  sense,  they  are  stronger  witnesses  against  this  carnality,  for 
they  come  more  directly  into  contact  with  the  acts  and  proceedings 
of  our  earthly  life,  which  are  wont  to  call  it  forth.  And  so  far 
from  considering  this  witness  as  less  belonging  to  our  age  than  to 
previous  ages,  I  believe  it  is  our  characteristic  infirmity,  that  we 
are  disposed  to  place  religion  in  a  middle  region,  and  that  we  will 


MODERN  INTERPRETERS  OF  SCRIPTURE. 


509 


not  understand  it  either  in  its  most  transcendent  character  or  in  its 
application  to  common  doings  and  daily  occurrences.  I  cannot 
help,  therefore,  suspecting  these  phrases  about  carnality  ;  they  in- 
dicate a  tendency  which  the  sight  of  a  national  commonwealth, 
constituted  as  the  Jewish  commonwealth  was,  might  counteract 
more  effectually  than  any  thing  which  one  sees  at  this  time,  or  per- 
haps has  seen  at  any  time,  in  the  Catholic  Church.  Neither,  again, 
do  I  understand  how  the  reappearance  of  such  a  commonwealth  on 
the  very  soil  which  was  the  original  seat  of  it,  could  be  other  than 
a  very  marvellous  and  glorious  testimony  to  the  mighty  scheme 
which  God,  whose  works  are  known  to  Him  from  the  beginning 
of  the  world,  has  been  carrying  on,  and  which  no  human  self-will 
can  frustrate.  To  me  it  seems  that  every  thing  is  tending  towards 
this  result ;  that  so  strange  a  body  as  the  Israelites  are  could  not 
have  been  permitted  to  exist  for  so  many  generations  unconnected 
with  any  country  or  polity,  if  such  a  destiny  were  not  in  reserve 
for  them  ;  that  it  is  a  strange  and  painful  effort  for  the  mind  even 
to  imagine  all  traces  of  national  distinctness  lost  in  men  who,  in 
their  glory  and  depression,  have  been  for  nearly  three  thousand 
years  witnesses  for  the  existence  of  such  distinctness;  that  this 
miracle  would  be  infinitely  more  startling  than  the  establishment  of 
a  Hebrew  commonwealth  in  Palestine ;  but  that  the  first  miracle 
would  be  in  violation  of  all  the  analogy  of  God's  dealings,  the 
other,  the  natural  consummation  of  them. 

These  conclusions  seem  to  me  so  reasonable,  that  I  cannot  help 
asking  myself  why  I  have  had  so  much  difficulty  in  arriving  at 
them,  and  why  so  many  persons,  less  hindered  than  I  may  be  by 
prejudice  or  want  of  faith,  should  still  experience  the  same  diffi- 
culty so  strongly.  And  I  cannot  help  feeling  that  the  mode  in 
which  the  claims  of  the  Jews  are  ordinarily  stated  has  been,  at  all 
events,  one  great  obstacle  to  oar  acknowledging  them.  At  one 
time  it  would  seem  as  if  the  modern  interpreters  of  prophecy  ex- 
pected that  the  Jewish  nation  should  take  the  place  of  the  univer- 
sal Church ;  at  another,  as  if  they  expected  Jerusalem  to  be  the 
centre  of  that  Church  in  the  next  age,  even  as  Rome  has  tried  to 
be  the  centre  of  it  in  this  ;  at  another,  as  if  they  believed  that  in  the 
restoration  of  all  things,  the  Jews  were  to  furnish  the  one  specimen 
of  a  true  and  godly  nation.    Now  it  is  very  possible  that  none  of 

33 


510 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


these  views  may  really  be  entertained  by  those  who  use  language 
which  appears  to  import  them.  But  surely  the  very  approxima- 
tion to  such  notions  may  well  inspire  good  men  with  some  alarm. 
If  we  are  to  relapse  into  a  national  dispensation,  if  the  idea  of  the 
universal  Church  is  to  be  absorbed  in  that  of  an  exclusive  society, 
all  the  promises  made  to  the  fathers,  it  seems  to  me,  are  set  at 
nought;  the  very  truth  of  which  the  Old  Testament  history  was 
pregnant  has  come  to  nothing;  the  mighty  conflicts  of  St.  Paul,  to 
prove  that  it  had  actually  been  brought  into  light,  were  idle  and 
vain;  the  last  eighteen  centuries  have  been  a  dead  blank  in  the 
annals  of  mankind.  If,  again,  the  principle  be  admitted,  that  in 
any  corner  of  the  universe,  in  profane  land  or  in  holy  land,  the 
spiritual  Church  can  find  a  visible  capital  for  herself,  the  principle 
of  Romanism  seems  to  be  confirmed,  and  all  the  sad  experiments 
which  have  demonstrated  it  to  be  an  ungodly  principle  are  set 
aside,  as  of  no  worth.  If,  lastly,  the  Jewish  nation  or  the  Jewish 
Church  is  to  exalt  itself  in  solitary  greatness  over  the  ruins  of  a 
fallen  universe,  it  seems  to  me  that  Isaiah  and  the  prophets  wTere 
wrong,  and  the  Pharisees  in  the  days  of  our  Lord's  incarnation 
strictly  right.  I  do  not  mean  merely  that  Isaiah  and  the  prophets 
looked  forward  to  a  universal  dispensation,  to  a  Church  which 
should  develop  itself  out  of  a  particular  nation  ;  but  I  mean  that 
they  uniformly  speak  of  Judea,  even  in  their  time,  as  the  centre  of 
a  set  of  countries,  each  of  wThich  was  (or  was  trying  to  be)  a  nation. 
The  burden  of  the  '  Valley  of  Vision'  stands  not  alone,  it  is  connect- 
ed with  the  burden  of  Egypt  and  the  burden  of  Moab,  with  the 
burden  of  Tyre  and  with  the  burden  of  Damascus.  The  Jewish 
nation  interprets  to  each  of  these  what  it  ought  to  be.  But  each 
is  looked  upon  as  standing  in  some  relation  to  the  Lord  God  of  the 
Hebrews;  each  as  connected  with  his  scheme  of  judgment  and 
mercy,  each  as  threatened  by  the  same  Babylonian  power.  This 
feeling  had  been  wholly  lost  by  the  Pharisees;  their  only  desire 
was  that  Judea  might  be  supreme  as  Rome  was  supreme,  that  it 
might,  in  fact,  be  that  Babylonian  monarchy  against  which  it  had 
been  for  so  many  generations  bearing  testimony.  But  supposing 
all  these  views  of  Jewish  restoration  were  abandoned,  then,  I  think, 
that  the  way  in  which  I  have  spoken  of  the  state  in  this  chapter 
may  possibly  strike  earnest  and  thoughtful  men  as  the  true  explana- 


MODERN  INTERPRETERS  OF  SCRIPTURE. 


511 


tion  and  justification  of  an  idea  which  they  cherish  so  devoutly, 
and  which  I  hope  they  may  not  be  obliged,  through  the  argu- 
ments of  their  opponents  or  through  their  own  inconsistencies,  to 
abandon. 

I  look  upon  the  Jewish  nation  as  an  abiding  sign  to  the  Chris- 
tian Church  of  the  honour  which  God  has  put  upon  national  life, 
and  of  his  will  that  the  Church  should  never  strive  to  set  itself  up 
as  something  separate  from  the  nations.  I  look  upon  it  as  the  sign 
to  each  nation  in  the  East  or  West  of  the  law  under  which  it  is 
constituted,  and  according  to  which  it  will  be  judged.  And  be- 
cause I  believe  this  to  be  a  true  unchangeable  law,  therefore  I  be- 
lieve it  will  at  last  make  itself  good  in  each  case.  One  great  cen- 
tral manifestation  of  it  may  be,  and  I  trust  and  believe  will  be,  the 
restoration  of  the  Jewish  commonwealth.  And  that  restoration 
will,  as  I  hope,  be  followed  by  the  restoration  to  national  life,  in 
connexion  with  Christian  and  catholic  life,  of  those  countries 
which  are  now  combined  under  the  sceptre  of  the  prophet,  separa- 
ted from  each  other  by  the  most  violent  sectarian  controversies,  in- 
capable of  understanding  how  they  may  be  distinct  and  yet  one. 
In  a  Christian  Jew  a  Mahometan  sees  what  he  was  meant  to  be  : 
sees  the  truth  embodied  which  he  has  been  twisting  into  a  denial 
and  a  falsehood.  I  cannot,  therefore,  quarrel  with  the  conviction 
of  those  who  dream  that  Jews  will  be  the  agents  in  the  conversion 
of  Mahometans,  and  that  a  Hebrew  nation  will  be  the  sun  and 
centre  of  the  Eastern  world.  But  if  no  one  pretends  that  such  a 
result  will  be  accomplished  without  great  conflicts  and  heavy  judg- 
ments, why  may  I  not  suppose  that  the  West  will,  through  the  like 
process,  attain  to  a  like  blessing  ?  Why  may  I  not  suppose  that 
the  principle  of  Judaism  will  be  asserted,  the  exclusiveness  of  Pha- 
risaism be  confounded,  by  the  full  development  of  European  na- 
tions, and  of  their  colonies  in  the  other  parts  of  the  world,  the  uni- 
versal Church  being  still  the  life-giving  power,  the  uniting  princi- 
ple to  them  all  ? 

2.  But  it  is  indeed  a  decisive  confutation  of  all  these  hopes,  if 
they  set  at  nought  that  truth  of  the  second  appearing  of  our  Lord, 
upon  which  the  Church  has  been  resting  in  her  greatest  troubles, 
and  to  which  the  Scriptures  urge  us  so  continually  to  look  forward. 
I  should  be  more  sorry  perhaps  than  most,  to  say  a  word  which 


512 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


could  weaken  this  faith  in  any  mind,  because  it  seems  to  me  that 
the  revival  of  it  in  our  day  has  been  one  great  means  of  removing 
the  clouds  which  had  hindered  us  from  looking  at  Christ's  Church 
as  a  Kingdom,  and  from  connecting  all  individual  blessings  and  re- 
wards with  its  existence  and  its  establishment  in  that  character. 
The  wretched  notion  of  a  private  selfish  Heaven,  where  compensa- 
tion shall  be  made  for  troubles  incurred,  and  prizes  given  for  duties 
performed  in  this  lower  sphere — this  unnatural  notion,  clothing  it- 
self in  the  language  of  Scripture  and  of  other  days  of  the  Church, 
but  severing  that  language  from  the  idea  wTith  which  it  was  always 
impregnated,  and  connecting  it  with  our  low,  grovelling,  mercan- 
tile habits  of  feeling,  had  infused  itself  into  our  popular  teachings 
and  our  theological  books.  It  could  not  be  driven  out  by  those 
who  merely  preached  the  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith,  for  they, 
in  their  eagerness  to  get  rid  of  the  doctrine  of  human  merit,  seemed 
to  take  away  the  hope  of  reward  altogether,  and  while  giving  a 
present  relief  to  the  conscience,  to  leave  the  heart  and  spirit  with- 
out any  future  object  after  which  they  might  aspire.  If  to  the  state 
of  feeling  which  either  of  these  forms  of  teaching  was  likely  to  pro- 
duce, there  has  succeeded  in  any  country  of  Europe  a  vague  and 
indistinct,  but  still  perhaps  a  real  acknowledgment  of  another  end 
which  men  may  seek  after,  than  the  selfish  individual  end,  even  the 
end  of  beholding  Him  in  whom  is  no  selfishness,  no  darkness  at  all, 
of  sharing  the  light  of  a  common  sun,  of  feeling  a  common  warmth 
and  life  from  his  rays,  the  change,  I  believe,  must  be  ascribed  in  a 
great  measure  to  those  who  have  steadfastly  asserted,  amidst  much 
opposition  from  others,  and  much  discouragement  from  the  confu- 
tation of  their  own  favourite  schemes  of  interpretation,  the  doctrine 
that  the  Church  is  to  live  in  the  expectation  of  the  appearance  and 
the  triumph  of  her  Head. 

But  the  more  strongly  I  feel  our  obligation  to  these  teachers  on 
this  account,  the  more  1  must  regret,  not  perhaps  particular  cru- 
dities of  opinion  which  may  have  mingled  themselves  with  this 
faith,  for  these  we  must  always  expect,  but  any  great  central  con- 
fusion which  may  have  weakened  the  grounds  upon  which  it  rests, 
made  it  unacceptable  to  wise  and  thoughtful  men,  and  given  an 
almost  unlimited  license  to  the  speculations  of  those  who  are  not 
thoughtful  or  wise.    Such  a  confusion  seems  to  me  to  lurk  in  the 


MODERN  INTERPRETERS  OF  SCRIPTURE. 


513 


notion  that  the  Advent,  or,  as  St.  Paul  far  more  frequently  describes 
it,  the  Epiphany  of  our  Lord,  will  be  the  beginning  of  a  new  order 
and  constitution  of  things.  Now  it  seems  to  me  that  the  phrases  in 
Scripture  which  refer  to  this  event  positively  refute  any  such  imagi- 
nation. The  appearance  of  a  light  which  shall  show  things  as  they 
are,  and  before  which  the  darkness  shall  flee  away,  the  day  of  judg- 
ment and  distinction,  the  gathering  of  all  together  in  one,  the  resto- 
ration of  all  things,  this  is  the  language  in  which  we  are  taught  to 
express  our  thoughts  and  anticipations  respecting  the  future.  Nay. 
such  is  the  language  we  are  obliged  to  use,  even  though  our  own 
theories  might  suggest  some  other  as  more  suitable.  And  what  do 
such  words  imply,  but  the  full  evidence  and  demonstration  of  that 
which  is  now  ;  the  dispersion  of  all  the  shadows  and  appearances 
which  have  counterfeited  it  or  have  hidden  it  from  view  ?  What 
do  they  imply,  but  the  existence  of  a  kingdom,  or  order,  or  consti- 
tution, which  men  have  been  trying  to  set  at  nought  and  deny,  but 
under  which  they  have  been  living  notwithstanding,  and  which,  in 
the  clear  sunlight  of  that  day,  is  shown  to  be  the  only  one  under 
which  they  can  live  ?  Is  not  this  view  of  the  case  exactly  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  language  of  those  who  speak  most  about  the 
second  Advent,  when  they  say  that  it  will  take  place  at  a  period  of 
great  darkness  and  almost  universal  denial  ?  Denial  of  what  ? — if 
not  of  a  truth  which  has  always  been  recognised  in  our  institutions 
and  our  ordinary  habits,  which  men  have  only  just  found  courage 
utterly  to  reject  as  inconsistent  with  their  conduct  and  their  other 
professions,  at  the  moment  which  shall  show  that  conduct  and  those 
professions  to  have  been  false,  the  witness  of  conscience  against 
them,  and  in  favour  of  that  which  they  resisted,  to  be  true  ?  Is 
there  any  shelter  from  this  conclusion  in  the  distinction  between  the 
spiritual  dispensation,  or  spiritual  kingdom  which  has  existed  since 
our  Lord's  first  Advent,  and  the  outward  visible  kingdom  which 
shall  be  established  after  his  second  ?  If  by  the  words  outward 
and  visible  it  be  meant  that  something  less  spiritual  is  in  reserve  for 
the  time  to  come  than  for  the  time  which  is ;  that  now  we  are  liv- 
ing by  faith,  that  then  we  shall  live  by  sense ;  that  now  we  recog- 
nise the  highest  glory  in  that  which  1  eye  hath  not  seen,  nor  ear 
heard,  nor  it  hath  entered  into  the  heart  of  man  to  conceive;'  that 
then  we  shall  recognise  all  glory  as  being  in  the  visible  and  com- 


514 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 


prehensible ;  I  cannot  conceive  a  darker  or  more  dreadful  vision 
than  this  of  a  millennial  perfection.  But  if  it  be  meant  by  outward 
and  visible,  that  Christ's  dominion  will  not  be  merely  over  the  heart 
and  spirit  of  man,  over  that  which  directly  connects  him  with  God 
and  the  unseen  world,  but  over  all  his  human  relations,  his  earthly 
associations,  over  the  policy  of  rulers,  over  nature  and  over  art, 
then,  I  say,  this  is  as  much  the  truth  now  as  it  ever  can  be  in  any 
future  period.  This  dominion  has  been  asserting  itself,  has  been 
making  itself  felt  for  these  eighteen  centuries.  The  Son  of  Man 
claimed  it  for  himself  when  He  did  not  abhor  the  Virgin's  womb, 
when  He  mingled  with  the  ordinary  transactions  of  men,  blessing 
their  food,  their  wine,  and  their  marriage  feasts.  The  claim  may 
have  been  denied  at  all  times ;  it  may  be  denied  especially  at  the 
time  to  which  we  are  looking  forward  ;  but  that  time  must  assert 
it,  not  as  something  new,  but  as  something  old ;  as  a  government 
which  has  been  actually  in  exercise,  and  the  ceasing  of  which, 
even  for  a  moment,  would  have  been  followed  by  dreariness  and 
death  throughout  the  universe.  Now  if  this  be  so,  I  think  that  the 
principle  which  I  have  endeavoured  to  defend  in  this  book  is  not  one 
which  interferes  with  any  sound  or  true  apprehensions  of  our  Lord's 
second  coming,  but  only  with  a  system  which  has  tended  to  prevent 
men  from  acknowledging  it ;  to  make  them  think  lightly  of  their 
present  responsibilities,  to  give  them  a  fantastic  habit  of  speaking 
respecting  the  course  of  God's  providence  in  the  world,  as  if  it  sig- 
nified nothing  new,  but  was  only  leading  to  something  hereafter ; 
and  which  is  very  likely  to  suggest  the  thought,  that  when  He  has 
taken  the  power  whose  right  it  is,  the  Cross  will  not  any  longer  be 
the  symbol  of  glory  and  victory. 

THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 

With  a  few  remarks  upon  the  charge  of  underrating  the  guilt 
and  punishment  of  Romish  apostasy,  1  will  conclude  this  part  of 
my  work. 

A  reader  who  has  followed  me  through  the  discussions  in  my 
last  and  present  chapter  will  scarcely  suspect  me  of  an  inclination 
to  look  more  mildly  upon  Romanism,  when  it  presents  itself  as  the 
sworn  enemy  of  nations  and  national  Churches,  than  when  it  came 
before  us  as  the  corrupter  of  creeds  and  sacraments.  One  evil  seems 


THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 


515 


to  be  necessarily  implied  in  the  other  ;  the  same  assumption  which 
made  it  an  uncatholic  principle  has  made  it  an  anti-national  prin- 
ciple. It  has  perverted  the  idea  of  spiritual  power,  therefore  it  has 
interfered  with  civil  power.  And  yet  if  we  look  at  it  on  another 
side,  that  which  we  call  in  common  parlance  the  Church  of  Rome 
has  borne  and  does  bear  a  very  striking  witness  on  behalf  of  the 
truth  that  Christ's  Church  is  a  kingdom,  and  not  merely  a  collec- 
tion of  sects  bound  together  in  the  profession  of  particular  dogmas. 
I  have  never  concealed  this  fact,  for  no  fact  ought  to  be  concealed 
which  concerns  the  history  and  government  of  the  world. 

But  what  is  it  that  we  call  the  Church  of  Rome  ?  /  call  it  the 
diocese  over  which  the  Bishop  of  Rome  presides  ;  I  know  no  other 
Church  of  Rome  than  this.  Certain  people  may  have  invented 
another  notion  for  it,  but  I  do  not  adopt  their  notion  ;  if  I  did,  I 
should  adopt  the  Romish  system.  Now  this  Church  of  Rome,  this 
Italian  diocese,  may  be  in  a  very  corrupt  state — I  am  afraid  it  is. 
I  think  many  persons  who  belong  to  it,  and  who  acknowledge  the 
jurisdiction  of  its  Bishop,  would  acknowledge  that  it  is.  They, 
therefore,  must  agree  with  us  in  desiring  that  it  should  be  reformed. 
Perhaps  they  would  agree  in  acknowledging,  also,  that  the  refor- 
mation is  likely  to  be  accompanied  with  many  punishments  and 
judgments  for  the  sins  of  which  its  members  have  been  guilty. 
The  nature  of  those  sins  and  the  roots  of  them  I  have  partly  con- 
sidered in  this  chapter.  The  nature  of  the  judgments  I  am  not 
competent,  and  I  have  no  wish  to  consider.  They  may  be  heavier 
or  lighter  than  any  other  which  will  come  upon  the  other  portions 
of  the  Church ;  they  may  even  go  the  length  of  leaving  Rome  a 
prey  to  some  infidel  power.  The  determining  of  this  question  is  in 
the  best  hands,  and  in  those  hands  we  must  leave  it,  as  we  may 
leave  also  the  fate  of  the  Spanish,  or  Gallican,  or  of  any  other 
Church. 

But  the  end  of  these  judgments,  I  conceive,  be  they  more  or 
less  tremendous,  will  be  the  destruction  of  a  false  apostate  system. 
You  say  that  the  system  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  Church ;  that  if 
one  perishes,  the  other  must  perish.  That  is  precisely  the  point 
about  which  I  know  nothing,  and  about  which  you  know  nothing. 
But  this  I  do  know,  that  as  long  as  a  man  is  alive  and  struggling, 
I  have  no  business  to  say  that  his  disease  and  he  are  identical,  that 


516  THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  NATION. 

the  cure  of  the  disease  must  be  the  death  of  the  patient.  Here  it 
is  that  I  am  at  issue  with  our  modern  interpreters  of  prophecy.  I 
do  not  differ  with  them  in  that  I  hate  the  Romish  system  less  than 
they  do.  It  often  seems  to  me  that  they  do  not  hate  it  sufficiently  ; 
that  they  do  not  see  where  its  extreme  evil  lies ;  that  they  are 
ready  to  tolerate  a  portion  of  its  evil  in  themselves.  And  this 
want  of  a  sufficient  appreciation  of  its  mischiefs,  I  discover  espe- 
cially in  their  language  respecting  the  Latin  Church.  They  do 
not  seem  to  see  that  popery  is  continually  undermining  the  Church, 
and  therefore  they  do  not  feel,  that  the  more  you  can  persuade  men 
to  be  Churchmen,  the  more  effectually  you  deliver  them  from  pope- 
ry. They  cry  out  to  the  members  of  the  different  Latin  Churches, 
'  Come  ye  out  of  Babylon,  and  be  ye  separate.'  Take  the  words 
as  they  stand  in  Scripture,  and  as  they  are  explained  by  the  whole 
context  of  Scripture,  and  there  cannot  be  any  more  important.  But 
how  are  they  to  be  obeyed  1  The  common  answer  is,  '  by  leaving 
the  corrupt  Church  to  which  you  belong.'  It  seems  to  me  that  the 
person  who  does  so,  is  exceedingly  likely  to  carry  the  Babylonian 
system  along  with  him,  and  to  leave  nothing  behind  but  the  good 
elements  which  were  mixed  with  it.  Whereas,  he  who  will  stay 
in  the  Church  of  his  fathers,  maintaining  resolutely  that  it  is  a 
Church,  and  that  those  who  have  struggled  to  deprive  it  of  its  dis- 
tinct ecclesiastical  character  are  his  enemies,  and  are  to  be  resisted, 
must,  I  think,  arrive  at  a  deliverance  from  popery.  He  will  not 
be  delivered  in  the  same  way  in  which  the  Protestant  nations  in  the 
sixteenth  century  were  delivered.  God  has  a  different  method  for 
working  out  the  freedom  of  his  servants  in  each  different  age ;  but 
I  cannot  see  why  it  should  be  a  less  effectual  method ;  I  hope  and 
trust  it  will  be  far  more  effectual.  The  serpent  at  the  Reformation 
was  scotched,  not  killed.  It  could  not  be  killed  so  long  as  there 
was  any  thing  good  remaining  in  it.  Once  separate  the  belief  of 
Christ's  kingdom  from  this  system,  once  believe  that  they  are  not 
necessary  to  each  other,  and  the  moral  power  of  the  papacy  is  gone. 
What  signifies  it,  then,  if  all  the  physical  power  in  the  universe 
should  for  a  time  be  granted  to  it,  if  kings  should  send  presents  to 
it,  if  all  forms  of  infidelity  and  false  worship  should  combine  them- 
selves with  it  ?  The  Church  may  then  with  confidence  take  up  the 
language  of  the  prophet,  "  Associate  yourselves,  and  ye  shall  be 


THE  ROMISH  SYSTEM. 


517 


broken  in  pieces ;  gird  yourselves,  and  ye  shall  be  broken  in  pieces  ; 
take  counsel  together,  and  it  shall  come  to  nought,  for  God  is  with 
us."* 

*  I  had  developed  at  some  length  in  reference  to  each  of  the  different  European 
nations,  the  idea  which  is  hinted  at  in  this  section.  My  object  was  to  show,  that 
there  are  at  the  present  moment  in  every  part  of  the  Continent,  indications  of  a 
struggle  which  is  very  imperfectly  explained  by  the  phrases,  1  democratical  tenden- 
cies,' 'dissatisfaction  with  old  opinions,'  'commencement  of  a  new  era' — a  struggle 
which  may  indeed  include  all  these  signs  or  promises,  but  which  can  be  very  little 
understood  by  any  one  who  overlooks  the  relation  between  Catholicism  and  Nation- 
ality, and  who  does  not  perceive  that  the  history  of  modern  Europe  has  been  one 
continual  effort  to  establish  or  to  break  that  relation.  I  had  inquired,  further,  whether 
this  question  has  lost  its  application  to  the  United  States  of  North  America,  or  whe- 
ther there  also,  it  be  not  that  which  will  take  precedence  of  every  other.  But  I 
found  that  I  was  led  almost  unawares  into  dreams  of  the  future,  which  may  be 
intended  for  each  of  these  nations  ;— and  such  dreams  seemed  scarcely  in  accord- 
ance with  the  character  of  a  book  which  aims  at  the  discovery  of  that  which  is 
solid  and  certain.  The  lesson  from  the  whole  is  expressed  in  the  sad,  consolatory 
dirge  which  poets  of  old  sang,  and  which  is  now  the  chant  of  the  whole  Church 
miiitant.— aihvov  aV.ivov  sins'  to  (T  tv  vi/.dro). 


PART  III. 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH  AND  THE  SYSTEMS  WHICH  DIVIDE  IT. 


CHAPTER  I. 

HOW  FAR  THIS  SUBJECT  IS  CONNECTED  WITH  THOSE  PREVIOUSLY 
DISCUSSED. 

Are  these  principles  applicable  to  our  circumstances  as  Eng- 
lishmen ?  If  not,  we  may  be  sure  that  there  is  some  flaw  in  them 
which  we  have  not  yet  detected.  If  they  are,  the  question  how 
to  apply  them  must  be,  above  all  others,  important  to  us. 

I  think  the  young  English  ecclesiastical  student  is  very  apt  to 
be  perplexed  with  questions  of  this  kind.  '  Is  our  National  Church, 
as  I  have  often  been  told  it  is,  the  best  in  the  world  ?  Supposing 
it  is  not,  why  may  I  not  go  in  search  of  a  better  1  It  is  easy  to 
talk  of  acquiescence  in  the  state  which  Providence  has  assigned  us. 
But  surely  there  are  circumstances  in  which  a  Christian  must  regard 
acquiescence  as  a  sin.  How  do  I  know  that  mine  are  not  these 
circumstances  ? 

Now  were  the  principles  which  have  seemed  to  prove  them- 
selves to  us  in  other  cases  appropriate  to  this  one,  the  reader  will 
perceive  at  once  that  there  is  a  fallacy  in  the  statement  of  these 
questions.  We  have  maintained  that  there  is  a  spiritual  and  uni- 
versal society  in  the  world :  that  there  are  also  National  Societies 
in  the  world,  that  the  Universal  Society  and  the  National  Society 
cannot,  according  to  the  scheme  of  Providence,  be  separated  from 
each  other,  that  when  they  are  brought  into  conjunction,  that  form 
of  character  which  is  intended  for  each  nation  is  gradually  deve- 
loped in  it,  by  means  of  the  spiritual  body.  Can  we  then  be  called 
upon  to  prove  either,  ( 1st,)  that  there  is  some  constitution  for  the 
Universal  Society  as  it  exists  in  England,  which  does  not  belong  to 
it  elsewhere,  and  which  makes  it  better  here  than  elsewhere;  or? 
(2,)  that  the  principles  which  unite  the  Universal  Society  with  the 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


519 


National  Society  among  us  are  not  the  same  principles  which  unite 
it  elsewhere,  and  that  we  are  better  for  this  difference,  or,  (3,)  that 
what  is  peculiarly  our  National  character,  ought  to  be  the  character 
of  every  other  nation  ?  Evidently,  no  one  who  has  any  real  affec- 
tion for  his  Church  or  his  land,  will  put  forth  such  claims  as  these 
on  its  behalf.  He  will  inquire  whether  it  does  or  does  not  recog- 
nise that  constitution  which  belongs  to  all  mankind  ;  whether  this 
constitution  be  or  be  not  so  recognised  here,  as  to  be  compatible 
with  the  distinct  National  constitution ;  what  character  it  is  which 
is  intended  for  Englishmen ;  how  that  character  may  be  realized  in 
its  perfection,  or  depraved.  But  putting  the  inquiry  into  this  form, 
one  does  not  see  what  acquiescence  can  be  demanded  of  us,  which 
is  inconsistent  with  the  position  of  militant  Christians.  Have  we 
lost  that  Universal  Constitution  or  any  element  of  it  ?  We  must 
labour  by  all  means  to  recover  it.  Have  we  lost  our  distinct  Na- 
tional position  ?  We  must  seek  it  again.  Are  we  living  incon- 
sistently with  the  one  or  the  other  1  We  must  inquire  where  the 
evil  is,  and  commence  at  once  the  wrork  of  personal  reformation. 
The  subject  then  upon  which  1  propose  now  to  enter  will  divide 
itself  in  the  way  which  I  have  indicated.  As  we  take  for  granted 
the  previous  steps  of  our  discussion,  it  will  not,  I  hope,  occupy  us 
long. 


SECTION  I. 

Do  the  signs  of  an  universal  and  spiritual  constitution  exist  in  England  ? 

There  is  no  difficulty  in  giving  a  direct  answer  to  this  question. 
Supposing  these  signs  to  be  Baptism,  the  Creeds,  Forms  of  Wor- 
ship, the  Eucharist,  the  Ministerial  Orders,  the  Scriptures,  no  one 
will  deny  that  a  society  has  existed  in  England  for  the  last  twelve 
hundred  years,  of  which  these  are  constituent  elements.  Under  all 
changes  in  the  outward  circumstances  of  the  country,  in  its  na- 
tional policy,  in  its  religious  opinions,  a  body  has  dwelt  in  this  land, 
which  has  acknowledged  not  one  or  two,  but  all  of  these  signs, 
which  has  acknowledged  them  as  the  conditions  of  its  own  sub- 
sistence. 

But  is  this  the  only  point  to  be  considered  ?    Ought  we  not  to 


520 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


inquire  whether  the  same  import  has  in  all  times,  or  what  import 
has  at  any  particular  time  been  attached  to  these  signs,  by  the 
body  which  acknowledged  them  ?  And  again,  may  there  not  be 
two  bodies  existing  at  the  same  time  in  this  country  differing  with 
each  other,  and  yet  both  acknowledging  all  these  signs  ?  In  such 
case  how  are  we  to  determine  which  does  and  which  does  not  re- 
present the  universal  society  ? 

I.  In  reference  to  the  first  question  I  answer,  If  you  mean  that 
I  am  to  take  the  votes  of  the  members  of  the  English  Church,  now 
or  at  any  period  since  it  was  established,  for  the  purpose  of  ascer- 
taining what  the  majority  think  or  have  thought  about  any  or  all 
these  signs ;  I  should  decline  the  task,  not  merely  on  the  ground  of 
its  impossibility,  but  because,  if  it  were  possible,  I  should  be  viola- 
ting all  the  principles  which  I  have  put  forward  in  this  book,  by 
undertaking  it.  I  have  said,  that  the  members  of  a  Church  will 
be  continually  losing  sight  of  the  grounds  of  the  society  to  which 
they  belong,  and  that  permanent  institutions  are  given  us  for  the 
purpose  of  witnessing  against  our  tendencies  to  degeneracy,  and 
of  enabling  us  to  obtain,  in  each  successive  age,  a  clearer  view  of 
the  Divine  purpose  and  order.  On  the  same  grounds,  I  must  pro- 
test against  any  attempt  to  ascertain  the  principles  of  the  English 
Church,  by  comparing  or  balancing  the  opinions  of  its  most  emi- 
nent writers.  For  I  have  urged,  that  permanent  creeds  and  insti- 
tutions are  our  preservatives  against  the  particular  judgments  and 
prepossessions  of  these  writers.  But  if  there  be  among  these  signs 
any  one  which  has  so  far  a  peculiar  character,  is  so  far  distinctively 
English,  that  it  may  be  taken  as  expressive  of  the  mind  of  the 
English  Church  itself,  by  that  I  am  most  willing  it  shall  be  tried. 
Now  a  Liturgy  is  of  this  kind.  I  have  shown  how  remarkably  it 
is  the  sign  of  an  universal  society.  Yet  it  is  equally  true  that  each 
nation  has  always  had  its  own  liturgies.  To  this,  therefore,  there 
is  a  fair  appeal.  But  how  shall  the  appeal  be  made  ?  Why  may 
I  not  read  my  own  opinions  into  the  liturgy  as  well  as  into  any 
other  book  ?  Undoubtedly  I  may.  And  therefore  the  fairer  way 
of  getting  at  its  meaning,  is  to  receive  it  from  others,  especially 
from  those  who  have  attacked  it.    Let  us  try  this  course. 

1.  Again  and  again  the  English  Dissenters  have  complained  of 
our  formularies,  because  they  assert  in  what  seems  to  them  such 


ITS  CATHOLIC  SIDE — LITURGY. 


521 


plain  and  direct  language,  so  solemnly,  so  habitually,  the  principle 
that  a  baptized  man  is  to  regard  himself  as  regenerate,  a  child  of 
God,  an  heir  of  the  blessings  of  the  New  Covenant.  f  It  is  idle,' 
say  these  Dissenters,  *  to  pretend  that  by  leaving  out  a  few  words 
in  your  form  of  baptism,  you  would  remove  this  dreadful  plague- 
spot  from  your  Church.  Supposing  that  were  possible,  think  what 
a  monstrous  delusion  you  have  been  propagating  in  such  solemn 
moments  for  so  many  generations.  What,  thrust  out  such  words 
privily  in  this  nineteenth  century !  They  ought  to  be  extirpated 
amidst  groans  and  confessions  of  sin,  for  having  mocked  God  and 
ruined  the  souls  of  men.  But  if  you  did  thrust  out  the  words,  the 
spirit  of  them  goes  through  all  your  other  services.  You  tell  the 
same  story  to  the  children  whom  you  are  catechising ;  you  declare 
to  them  that  they  are  members  of  Christ,  and  children  of  God. 
Nay,  every  confession  and  every  prayer  in  which  you  call  upon 
adults  old  in  sin  to  engage,  turns  upon  the  same  principle.  You 
invite  them  to  confess  and  to  pray,  as  if  they  were  children  of  God, 
and  as  if  the  Spirit  were  still  with  them.' 

That  these  charges  are  constantly  preferred  against  us  every 
one  knows.  I  ask,  are  they  not  true  ?  Has  any  apologist  for  the 
liturgy,  who  agreed  with  the  Dissenters  in  their  theological  princi- 
ple, been  able  to  refute  them  ?  And  is  it  not  very  painful  to  think 
that  we  should  be  using  equivocations  and  double  meanings,  at  a 
time  when  we  are  professing  to  address  the  most  awful  prayers  to 
Him  who  is  truth  ?  1  may  affirm  then,  not  from  any  conclusions  of 
my  own,  but  on  the  authority  of  those  w7ho  are  most  opposed  to  me, 
that  the  idea  of  baptismal  Regeneration  is  the  idea  of  our  Liturgy. 

But  is  this  connected  with  the  idea  of  an  opus  operatum?  I 
think  the  question  has  already  been  answered.  The  Dissenter  per- 
ceives, every  one  who  thinks  perceives,  that  the  whole  of  our 
liturgy  is  constructed  upon  the  principle,  that  the  men  who  engage 
in  it  have  not  lost  their  baptismal  privileges;  that  the  sin  which 
they  confess  is  the  sin  of  not  having  owned  God  as  their  father,  of 
not  having  remembered  his  covenant,  and  therefore,  of  not  having 
walked  in  his  ways  ;  that  they  ask  to  be  restored  to  the  enjoyment 
of  a  position  with  which  their  lives  need  not  have  been  and  have 
been  at  variance;  in  one  word,  that  the  sacrament  is  not  believed 
to  have  conferred  on  men  a  temporary  blessing,  but  to  have  ad- 


522 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


mitted  them  into  a  permanent  state,  which  is  at  all  times  theirs, 
which  they  are  bound  at  all  times  to  claim,  and  by  which  they  will 
be  judged. 

I  know  that  we  have  apologists  who  can  defend  us  from  this 
imputation  as  well  as  the  other,  by  dint  of  ingenious  special  plead- 
ing.   They  say, '  all  this  language  presumes  the  existence  of  dis- 
cipline ;  we  have  undoubtedly  lost  our  discipline,  but  we  are  not 
therefore  to  lose  our  prayers.'    How,  not  to  lose  our  prayers  !  We 
had  better  lose  any  thing  than  go  on  in  direct  mockery  of  God.  If 
the  want  of  discipline  makes  the  prayers  false,  if  there  are  not  half 
a  dozen  persons  in  any  congregation  who  would  dare  to  say,  they 
have  not  lost  their  baptismal  purity  ;  and  if  those  nine  or  ten  be 
the  very  persons,  who  one  may  be  sure  cannot  join  in  these  prayers, 
or  in  any  prayer  but  that  of  the  Pharisee,  how  can  we  have  courage 
to  practise  such  profaneness,  because,  at  some  time  or  another,  we 
hope  to  get  a  discipline  which  shall  cut  off  the  majority  of  those 
who  now  call  themselves  Churchmen  ?    But  does  our  liturgy  give 
the  slightest  sanction  to  the  notion,  that  the  most  complete  restora- 
tion of  discipline  would  make  these  prayers  more  true  than  they 
are  now  1    Why,  then,  in  her  '  Commination  Service'  does  she  not 
announce  the  doctrine  of  the  opus  operatum  ?    Why  does  she  not 
say,  there, '  you  have  been  made  members  of  Christ  once,  but  the 
privilege  is  gone,  the  blessing  is  exhausted ;  you  have  resisted  the 
Spirit,  He  is  striving  no  more  with  you ;  recover  the  gift,  if  possi- 
ble, by  penitence  and  prayer  V    Why  in  this  service,  as  much  as 
in  all  the  rest,  are  men  called  to  repent,  on  the  ground  of  their 
being  children,  though  rebellious  children ;  on  the  ground  of  the 
will  of  God,  that  they  should  turn  from  their  wickedness  and  live  ? 

2.  Thus  far  I  have  spoken  of  baptism.  The  view  which  the 
liturgy  takes  of  the  Creeds,  is  sufficiently  evident  from  the  mode  of 
their  introduction  into  it.  They  are  made  parts  of  our  worship ; 
acts  of  allegiance,  declarations  by  the  whole  congregation  of  the 
name  into  which  each  one  has  been  baptized ;  preparations  for  pray- 
ers; steps  to  communion.  The  notion  of  them  as  mere  collections  of 
dogmas  is  never  once  insinuated,  is  refuted  by  the  whole  order  of  the 
services. 

3.  In  speaking  of  the  Eucharist,  it  is  safer  again  to  refer  to  the 
language  of  opponents.    Again  and  again  we  have  been  told,  that 


ITS  CATHOLIC  SIDE  LITURGY. 


523 


the  idea  of  a  real  presence  is  distinctly  implied  in  our  communion 
service.  That  at  all  events  the  words  must  convey  this  impression 
to  any  ordinary  person;  that  they  are  such  as  could  not  have  been 
written  by  any  one  who  held  the  simple  Zuinglian  dogma,  and  can- 
not be  used  with  comfort,  nay,  without  a  sense  of  pain  and  contra- 
diction, by  any  one  who  feels  it  to  be  the  true  one.  And  what 
though  there  may  be  constant  admonitions  respecting  the  spirit  in 
which  this  sacrament  is  to  be  received,  the  faith  and  repentance 
which  are  the  preparations  for  it,  the  danger  of  a  careless  and  un- 
worthy treatment  of  such  mysteries,  is  it  not  evident  at  the  same 
time,  from  the  earnest  exhortations  to  partake  of  it,  that  it  is  looked 
upon  as  a  common  blessing,  as  one  to  which  all  men  have  a  claim, 
as  one  from  which  it  is  a  perilous  responsibility  to  exclude  any, 
whose  open  sins  do  not  show  that  they  have  excluded  themselves? 
The  English  Dissenter,  regarding  this  ordinance  as  the  right  of  a 
few  who  can  give  an  account  of  their  feelings,  and  experiences, 
and  change  of  mind,  is  continually  denouncing  our  service  for  its 
manifest  departure  from  the  maxims  upon  which  he  acts.  On  the 
one  hand  the  Eucharist  is  spoken  of  in  such  awful  language,  as  it 
seems  to  him  must  have  been  borrowed  from  periods  of  pure  super- 
stition ;  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  the  strangest  notion  of  it,  as  if 
it  were  a  bond  of  fellowship  for  the  whole  universe.  '  One  would 
suppose,'  he  says,  1  from  the  phrases  you  use,  that  you  look  upon 
this  sacrament  as  the  very  opening  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  and 
yet  you  treat  it  as  the  proper  preparation  for  the  most  vulgar  and 
earthly  employments.  Sometimes  you  seem  to  fancy  it  possible, 
that  men  should  eat  the  flesh  and  drink  the  blood  of  the  Son  of  Man 
by  partaking  of  these  elements,  and  yet  you  can  admit  persons  to 
be  partakers  of  it  who  would  have  very  great  difficulty  in  explain- 
ing themselves  respecting  the  most  ordinary  propositions  of  the 
Christian  system.  By  your  carefulness  in  restraining  the  administra- 
tion of  the  sacrament  to  a  particular  class,  one  would  suppose  that  you 
regarded  it  as  a  Jewish  sacrifice,  or  as  something  yet  more  wonderful. 
And  yet  you  speak,  at  the  same  time,  of  the  sacrifice  of  Christ,  once 
made  upon  the  cross,  as  full,  and  sufficient,  and  satisfactory.' 

Meantime,  it  is  not  pretended  by  any  person,  be  he  friend  or  foe, 
that  a  single  passage  exists  in  this  service  which  favours  the  notion 
that  the  presence  of  Christ  is  connected  with  a  change  in  the  ele- 


524 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


ments.  Whoever  adopts  that  notion  instantly  becomes  dissatisfied 
with  the  eucharistic  part  of  our  liturgy,  proclaims  it  to  be  cold, 
heartless,  dead,  &c.  In  like  manner,  whoever  believes  the  Eucha- 
rist to  be  a  sacrifice  in  any  sense  which  implies  that  the  sacrifice  of 
Christ  upon  the  cross  is  less  complete  and  finished  for  all  mankin 
than  it  has  been  supposed  to  be  by  the  strongest  Lutheran  or  Cal- 
vinist,  also  denounces  our  liturgy  as  departing  from  that  idea  which 
the  Mass,  in  other  portions  of  the  Latin  Church,  embodies.  By  the 
confession,  then,  of  all,  it  regards  the  feast  as  the  highest  Christian 
privilege,  as  the  most  complete  reality ;  not  because  it  works  a 
change  in  our  Christian  state  and  position;  not  because  it  brings 
one  before  us  who  is  habitually  absent  from  us,  but  because  it  ena- 
bles us  to  enter  into  the  fulness  of  our  Church  life,  into  that  truly 
human  and  divine  fellowship,  which  Christ,  by  his  incarnation,  his 
death,  and  his  ascension,  has  claimed  for  all  whom  He  is  not  asham- 
ed to  call  his  brethren. 

4.  This  being  the  case,  the  communion  service  in  our  liturgy 
interprets  the  rest  of  our  worship.  Throughout,  it  is  the  worship  of 
a  body,  of  a  family.  It  is  open,  and  has  been  subject,  to  all  the 
objections  which  the  defenders  of  extempore  prayer  can  raise  against 
any  form  as  belonging  to  mankind  in  general,  and  not  to  our  nation 
and  our  family,  to  our  particular  circumstances,  except  so  far  as  we 
can  connect  them  with  the  knowledge  of  God  and  of  his  purposes 
to  our  race.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  open,  and  has  been  subject, 
to  the  objections  of  those  who  think  that  worship  is  cold  and  dead, 
if  it  lead  us  from  the  visible  to  the  invisible,  if  it  claim  the  privilege 
of  approaching  at  once  through  the  Mediator,  the  throne  of  the 
Absolute  and  the  Infinite.  It  proscribes  nothing ;  it  does  not  affirm 
how  much  or  how  little  of  the  sensible  may  be  useful  in  assisting 
us  to  reach  that  which  is  beyond  our  senses.  Human  agency  and 
help  it  distinctly  recognises  as  the  appointed  and  ordinary  channel 
through  which  the  blessings  of  Him,  who  was  made  flesh,  descend 
upon  his  Church,  and  through  which  the  prayers  and  praises  of  his 
Church  ascend  as  an  united  sacrifice  to  Him.  But  it  does  affirm, 
that  all  sensible  helps,  and  all  human  agency,  lose  their  meaning  and 
become  positively  evil  when  they  are  converted  into  ends,  or  when 
they  impair  the  belief  that  the  whole  Church  is  admitted  into  the 
holiest  place. 


ITS  CATHOLIC  SIDE  LITURGY. 


525 


5.  It  is  impossible  to  separate  this  subject  from  that  of  ministe- 
rial orders,  as  it  Is  expounded  to  us  in  our  ordination  and  consecra- 
tion services.    Part  of  the  complaint  against  these  has  been  con- 
sidered alreadv.    Only  those  who  have  received  presbyterial  ordi- 
nation are  allowed  to  administer  the  Eucharist  %r  to  pronounce  ab- 
solution.   -Now,'  argue  the  Dissenters, 4  you  may  say  if  you  will, 
that  the  words  tiQecfivTiQOS  anc^  *£Q&>$  are  different ;  and  that  you 
affix  the  former,  not  the  latter,  to  the  second  rank  of  your  ministers. 
But  is  not  the  refusal  of  these  particular  offices  to  the  lower  order 
a  distinct  and  significant  recognition  of  the  prin:iple,  though  you 
mav  not  express  it  by  a  name  ?  If  your  Church  felt  as  we  do  about 
the  sin  of  appropriating  these  names  to  men,  would  she  have  dared 
to  approach  so  very  closely  in  her  acts  to  such  an  assumption'? 
Would  she  have  proceeded  habitually  upon  a  maxim,  which  must 
at  least  convey  the  impression,  that  she  thinks  it  no  assumption  at 
all  V    I  leave  those  who  please  to  answer  these  arguments;  to  me 
thev  seem  irresistible.    Nor  am  I  better  able  to  clear  our  ser- 
vices of  the  charge  of  distinctly  and  formally  connecting  the  gift  of 
spiritual  powers  with  ordination;  of  distinctly  encouraging  and 
urging  her  ministers  to  believe,  that  they  have  the  Holy  Spirit  com- 
mitted to  them  for  the  work  of  the  ministry.    I  do  not  complain  of 
anv  one  who  performs  the  office  of  a  minister  in  our  Church,  and 
yet  believes  that  he  possesses  no  such  power.    I  should  no  more 
wish  to  exclude  him  from  his  office  on  that  account,  than  I  should 
wish  to  depose  a  magistrate  who  did  not  understand  the  extent  of 
the  powers  which  the  laws  invested  him  with.    Each  may  be  using 
that  which  he  does  believe  is  his,  very  far  more  honestly  than  I  am 
using  that  which  I  believe  is  mine.    Each  is  far  more  honest  than 
he  would  be  if  he  merely  acknowledged  the  words  without  attach- 
ing a  meaning  to  them.    But  still  the  words  are  there :  and  I  think 
he  cannot  complain  of  me  for  taking  them  in  their  plain  sense;  for 
saying  that  little  as  I  enter  into  their  force,  little  as  my  conduct  cor- 
responds with  them,  there  are  very  few  which  I  have  ever  heard, 
that  I  could  bear  less  to  part  with,  or  that  I  more  feel  I  must  learn 
to  understand  by  acting  upon  the  conviction  of  their  truth. 

With  the  continual  allegation  of  Dissenters,  that  in  spite  of 
many  tendencies  to  the  contrary  opinion  in  some  of  our  divines, 
ancient  as  well  as  modern,  our  liturgy  recognises  the  Episcopate 

34 


526 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


as  the  root  of  all  the  other  orders,  and  supposes  it  to  contain  them 
all  within  itself,  I  can  as  little  quarrel  as  with  either  of  the  former. 
They  seem  to  me  to  have  made  their  point  good.  And  I  cannot 
find  that  any  answers  which  have  been  made  to  them,  amount  to 
more  than  awkward  though  ingenious  evasions. 

But  where  are  we  to  find  the  doctrine  of  the  vicarial  powers  of 
ministers  in  any  part  of  these  services  1  Where  are  we  to  find  one 
single  hint  that  the  Presbyter  absolves  or  administers  the  Eucharist, 
that  the  Bishop  exercises  his  own  functions  or  that  he  ordains 
others,  as  the  minister  and  delegate  of  one  who  is  absent  from  his 
Church  ?  Those  who  adopt  this  opinion  begin  at  once  to  exclaim 
against  our  services,  as  containing  the  most  cold  and  unsatisfactory 
recognition  of  the  mighty  authority  with  which  the  Priest  and 
Bishop  of  the  New  Testament  are  endowed.  They  feel  it  absolutely 
necessary  that  he  should  clothe  himself  with  other  attributes,  in 
another  mystery  than  any  which  the  English  Church  recognises  in 
him.  The  self-same  language  which  offends  the  Dissenter  as  con- 
taining such  high  and  profane  assertions  of  a  perpetually  derived 
and  renewing  power,  is  that  which  contradicts  this  notion  of  an  in- 
herent power. 

6.  Lastly,  we  come  to  the  Scriptures.    Here  the  intention  of 
the  liturgy  seems  remarkably  evident.    The  Scripture  is  adopted 
into  our  worship,  the  service  explains  the  lessons,  the  lessons  ex- 
plain the  service.   The  Bible  is  read  partly  as  a  continuous  history, 
the  history  of  God's  revelation,  and  of  the  Church's  growth  and 
expansion ;  partly  in  connection  with  our  communion  — the  epistles 
of  the  New  Testament  expounding  to  us  the  law  of  the  Spirit  of 
life,  the  Gospels,  the  image  after  which  the  Spirit  would  form  us. 
This  is  precisely  that  relation  between  the  Scriptures  and  the 
Church,  which  I  endeavoured  to  set  forth  in  the  former  part  of  this 
book     The  Protestant  Dissenter  says,  that  we  set  aside  the  Bible, 
though  we  read  more  of  it  in  any  one  month  in  one  of  our  Churches, 
than  he  reads  in  two  years  in  any  of  his  meetings ;  and  though  our 
reading  of  it  is  continuous,  his  casual  and  arbitrary.   The  Romanist 
says,  that  we  set  aside  the  authority  of  the  Church  in  the  interpre- 
tation of  Scripture,  though  we  make  it  a  formal  and  habitual  part 
of  the  services,  in  which  the  mind  of  the  Church  is  expressed. 
II.  1.  I  think  then,  I  have  answered  the  question  as  to  the 


ITS  CATHOLIC  SIDE  WHO  ARE  CATHOLICS? 


527 


meaning,  which  the  English  Church  puts  upon  the  signs  which  it 
has  in  common  with  other  Churches,  fairly  and  legitimately. 
Another  question  was,  how  we  can  determine  between  two  bodies, 
both  existing  in  this  country,  and  both  possessing  these  signs, 
which  may  and  which  may  not  fairly  call  itself  Catholic.  If  our 
previous  statements  have  been  true,  this  question  is  also  settled. 
A  body  acknowledging  itself  connected  with  the  Church  in  all 
previous  ages  by  the  bond  of  sacraments,  of  creeds,  of  worship,  of 
ministerial  succession,  has  the  prima  facie  marks  of  Catholicity. 
Should  any  other  body  standing  aloof  from  it,  put  in  a  claim  upon 
the  same  grounds  to  be  Catholic,  it  is  bound  to  show  the  reasons  of  its 
own  pretension,  and  the  reasons  upon  which  it  rejects  the  former  pre- 
tension. Those  reasons  must  be  the  same  which  we  have  considered 
already.  We  are  not  Catholic  in  the  opinion  of  the  Romish  body  which 
resides  in  this  country,  because  we  do  not  acknowledge  the  opus  opera- 
turn  in  Baptism,  the  new  creeds  of  Popes,  Transubstantiation,  the  Eu- 
charist, the  existence  of  an  intermediate  agency  between  Christ  and 
his  members  on  earth,  the  vicarial  authority  of  ministers,  the  ex- 
istence of  a  Universal  mortal  Bishop,  the  right  of  the  Church  to 
hide  the  Scriptures  from  the  Laity,  in  one  word,  because  we  do  not 
acknowledge  that  system  which  appeared  to  us  before  we  entered 
upon  English  ground  at  all,  to  be  anti-Catholic.  The  Church  in 
every  land  exists  under  the  condition,  either  of  professing  this  sys- 
tem, or  of  protesting  against  it.  Its  existence  is  not  denoted  by  the 
Profession,  or  by  the  Protest,  but  by  the  Signs  to  which  the  profes- 
sion and  the  protest  refer.  If  the  Romish  body  say  that  it  stands 
in  certain  notions  about  sacraments  and  about  orders,  and  not  in  its 
sacraments  and  in  its  orders  themselves,  that  declaration  is  a  prac- 
tical renunciation  of  its  claims  to  be  a  Church.  We  say  that  we 
protest  against  these  notions,  because  they  are  incompatible  with 
the  acknowledgment  of  Christ's  Spiritual  and  Universal  Kingdom. 

2.  But  since  we  have  seen  that  the  confessions  in  different 
Protestant  bodies  have  (contrary  to  the  intentions  of  their  com- 
pilers) greatly  interfered  with  the  simple  recognition  of  the  facts 
contained  in  the  creed,  and  that  the  Romish  confessions  sanctioned  by 
the  Council  of  Trent,  and  by  Pope  Pius  IV.,  interfere  with  it  yet 
more  ;  we  are  bound  to  show  whether  there  is  any  thing  corres- 
ponding to  these  in  the  Church  of  England,  any  addition  made 


528 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


upon  its  own  authority  to  the  admitted  formularies  of  the  whole 
Church.  Till  we  are  satisfied  on  this  point  we  cannot,  I  conceive, 
rightly  understand  our  own  position  in  reference  to  the  other  por- 
tions of  the  Church. 

Now  it  appears  that  in  the  sixteenth  century,  we  as  well  as  the 
Protestants  and  Romanists  on  the  Continent,  drew  up  a  set  of  dog- 
matic articles,  and  that  these  have  continued  to  be  the  test  of  ortho- 
doxy for  those  who  take  orders  in  our  Church  and  for  those  who 
are  studying  in  at  least  one  of  our  universities,  ever  since.  Seeing 
then,  that  there  were  different  systems  at  that  time  in  vogue,  and 
that  the  object  of  different  religious  bodies  in  making  confessions, 
was  to  identify  themselves  with  one  or  other  of  these  systems;  (for 
example,  the  Genevan  body  thus  identified  itself  with  the  Calvin- 
istic  system,  the  Romanist  bodies  with  the  Tridentine  system ;)  we 
must  desire  to  know  how  far  these  articles  of  ours  identify  us  with 
any  of  them.  One  remark  has  been  made  respecting  them,  which 
is  not  unimportant  for  our  present  purpose,  that  they  carefully 
avoid  any  intrusion  upon  the  ground  occupied  by  the  old  creeds. 
They  do  not  take  the  living  forms  of  the  creeds,  they  constitute  a 
set  of  distinct  dogmatic  propositions ;  they  would  be  ridiculous  if 
introduced  into  worship,  they  are  not  intended  for  the  majority  of 
the  laity ;  they  belong  exclusively  to  the  student.  But  these  ob- 
servations respecting  them  would  be  of  little  worth,  if  it  appeared 
that  they  inculcate  upon  the  teacher  a  certain  theological  system 
alien  from  the  spirit  and  temper  of  the  creeds ;  for  this  system  he 
will  communicate  to  those  who  hear  him. 

How  stands  the  case  ?  We  have  seen  that  there  is  one  main 
characteristic  of  the  Calvinistic  system  as  a  system.  It  makes  the 
fall  of  man  the  central  point  of  its  divinity  :  it  treats  the  incarna- 
tion, and  all  the  facts  which  manifest  the  Son  of  God  to  men,  as 
merely  growing  out  of  this,  and  necessary  in  consequence  of  it.* 
On  this  principle  that  very  spirited  confession  which  was  drawn  up 
by  the  Scotch  preachers  for  the  use  of  the  Kirk  in  the  sixteenth 
century,  is  constructed.    The  first  article  is  on  the  Trinity;  the 

*  A  reader  may  ask,  what  then  is  meant  by  a  Supralapsarian  ?    I  answer,  not  a  per 
son  who  supposes  the  union  of  mankind  with  its  Creator  to  be  an  idea  anterior  to  that  of 
the  fall,  but  a  person  who  thinks  that  the  redemption  and  salvation  of  certain  individuals 
out  of  mankind,  is  the  highest  end  of  all  God's  purposes,  lor  the  sake  of  which  the  fall  itself 
was  permitted  and  ordained. 


ITS  CATHOLIC    SIDE  WHO  ARE  CATHOLICS  : 


529 


second,  on  the  Fall ;  then  comes  the  explanation  of  the  existence 
of  the  Church  or  Kirk,  as  grounded  upon  the  predestination  of  cer- 
tain individuals  in  this  fallen  race,  to  eternal  life.  There  cannot 
be  a  finer  or  better  model  of  a  purely  Calvinistical  confession  than 
this  one ;  nor  any  which  illustrates  more  completely  the  direct  op- 
position between  the  idea  of  the  Genevan  system,  and  the  idea  of 
the  old  Catholic  Creeds.  We  have  seen  again,  that  the  Lutheran 
had  a  very  different  conception  of  Christianity  from  this,  a  great 
desire  to  make  the  incarnation  of  Christ  the  centre  of  all  his 
thoughts,  and  to  use  the  Apostles'  Creed  as  his  symbol :  of  such  a 
disposition  the  Augsburg  confession  is  a  satisfactory  testimony.  But 
we  have  seen  also,  that  in  his  eagerness  to  assert  conscious  Justi- 
fication, as  the  one  great  principle  of  divinity,  he  was  driven  back 
upon  the  same  ground  as  the  Calvinist ;  he  was  forced  to  start  from 
the  evil  root,  in  order  that  he  might  explain  the  process  of  restora- 
tion. Aud  thus,  as  I  remarked  before,  systematic  Protestantism 
became  identical  with  Calvinism,  until  the  Arminian  form  of  it  was 
developed,  which  is  little  more  than  a  contradiction  of  Calvinism, 
little  more  than  a  denial  of  the  principle,  that  the  will  of  God  is 
the  orginating  cause  of  all  good  in  man. 

Now  if  any  one  will  turn  to  our  Thirty-nine  'Articles,  he  will 
perceive  that  the  first  article  being  upon  the  Trinity,  the  second  is 
upon  the  Incarnation,  and  that  the  first  eight  articles  relate  to  truths 
directly  connected  with  the  being  of  God,  to  his  manifestations  of 
Himself,  to  the  Scriptures  as  expounding  them,  to  the  Creeds  as 
illustrating  and  interpreting  the  Scriptures.  When  this  Catholic 
foundation  has  been  laid,  we  proceed  in  the  ninth  Article  to  the 
fall  of  man,  and  then  to  all  those  questions  concerning  free-will, 
justification  and  election,  which  were  occupying  men's  minds  in  the 
sixteenth  century.  On  all  these  points  it  seems  to  me  the  language 
of  the  Articles  is  as  distinct  and  definite  as  it  can  be.  The  Cal- 
vinistic  and  Lutheran  principles  are  plainly  and  distinctly  asserted, 
there  is  no  hint  or  prophecy  of  Arminianism  ;  the  Romish  system 
in  every  point  wherein  it  is  opposed  to  the  distinct  affirmations  of 
the  Reformers,  on  the  subject  of  God's  will  and  man's  faith,  is  re- 
pudiated ;  that  is  to  say,  the  System  of  Romanism  is  rejected  in  the 
articles  from  the  ninth  to  the  nineteenth,  just  as  the  system  of  Cal- 
vinism, or  pure  Protestantism,  had  been  repudiated  by  the  articles 


530 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


from  the  first  to  the  eighth.  The  principles  of  the  Reformation 
are  asserted  in  the  one  division,  not  as  necessary  qualifications,  but 
as  indispensable  conditions  of  the  great  Catholic  truths  which  had 
been  asserted  in  the  other.  And  so  to  whatever  cause  we  owe  it, 
this  has  been  the  result  of  these  articles ;  they  have  been  thorns 
in  the  side  of  those  who  have  wished  to  establish  an  English  theo- 
logical system,  either  fashioned  out  of  the  materials  which  Roman- 
ism or  Calvinism  supplies ;  they  have  encouraged  persons  of  all 
sects  and  schools  to  hope  that  their  principles,  in  some  sense  or 
other,  might  be  contained  in  them,  or  by  some  process  or  other 
extracted  out  of  them,  or,  at  all  events,  not  positively  denied  by 
them  ;  and  yet  there  is  no  sect  or  school,  when  speaking  its  sect  or 
school  language,  which,  if  it  were  honest,  would  not  confess  that 
there  are  clauses  and  passages  in  them  which  it  would  be  glad  to 
be  rid  of,  that  a  small  omission,  or  addition,  of  a  '  not  ■  would  often 
be  very  acceptable  to  it ;  that  it  would  like  exceedingly,  if  not  to 
remodel  them,  at  least  to  subjoin  to  them  on  all  occasions  a  com- 
mentary of  its  own. 

I  conclude  this  head  with  remarking,  that  if  our  observations 
respecting  the  true  meaning  of  Quakerism,  of  Calvinism,  of  Luther- 
anism,  of  Unitarianism,  be  true,  the  ideas  and  principles  of  each  of 
these  bodies  are  expressed  in  the  forms  of  our  English  Church ; 
only  the  system  which  they  have  grafted  upon  these,  and  which 
have  separated  them  from  each  other,  rejected.  The  idea  of  men 
as  constituted  in  the  divine  Word,  of  a  Kingdom  based  upon  that 
constitution,  of  a  Spirit  working  to  bring  him  into  conformity  with 
it,  of  a  perpetual  struggle  with  an  evil  and  sensual  nature,  this  is 
the  idea  of  Quakerism,  and  it  is  the  idea  of  our  Liturgy  in  every 
one  of  its  forms  and  services.  The  idea  of  a  divine  Will  going 
before  all  acts  of  the  human  Will,  the  primary  source  of  all  that 
is  in  eternity,  and  all  that  becomes  in  time,  to  which  every  thing  is 
meant  to  be  in  subjection,  which  can  alone  bring  that  which  has 
rebelled  into  subjection,  to  which  every  creature  must  attribute  all 
the  motions  to  good  which  he  finds  within  him,  the  primary  direc- 
tion of  his  thoughts,  the  power  of  perseverance,  this  is  the  idea  of 
Calvinism,  and  it  is  the  idea  which  is  implied  in  all  the  prayers  of 
our  Litany,  which  is  formally  set  forth  in  the  words  of  our  Articles. 
The  idea  of  man  struggling  with  his  own  evil  nature,  discover- 


ITS  NATIONAL  SIDE. 


531 


ing  in  it  nothing  but  a  bottomless  pit  of  evil,  grasping  at  a  deliverer, 
finding  that  in  union  with  him  only  is  his  life ;  that  he  is  strong  only 
in  his  strength,  righteous  only  in  his  righteousness  ;  this  is  the  idea 
of  Lutheranism,  and  it  is  the  idea  which  is  involved  in  all  our 
prayers  and  Creeds,  which  our  Articles  reassert  in  logical  terms. 
The  idea  of  an  unity  which  lies  beneath  all  other  unity ;  of  a  love 
which  is  the  ground  of  all  other  love,  of  Humanity  as  connected 
with  that  love,  regarded  by  it,  comprehended  in  it,  this  is  the  idea 
which  has  hovered  about  the  mind  of  the  Unitarian,  and  which  he 
has  vainly  attempted  to  comprehend  in  his  system  of  contradictions 
and  denials  :  this  idea  is  the  basis  of  our  Liturgy,  our  Articles,  our 
Church. 


SECTION  II. 

Does  the  Universal  Society  in  England  exist  apart  from  its  Civil  Institutions,  or  in 
union  with  them  ? 

To  this  question  the  answer  is  unanimous. 

The  English  dissenter  affirms  that  the  Church  is  embodied  in  the 
State;  it  is  an  Act  of  Parliament  Church.  The  modern  civil  Ruler 
says,  that  the  state  is  impeded  in  all  its  operations  by  the  Church  ; 
the  Sovereign  is  crowned  by  the  Archbishop,  the  Bishops  as  a  body 
take  part  in  the  deliberations  of  parliament ;  above  all,  the  greater 
part  of  the  education  of  the  land  is  ecclesiastical.  The  Romanist 
affirms  that  the  Church  has  no  pretensions  to  be  called  a  Catholic 
body  ;  it  is  a  national  body.  There  can  be  no  doubt  then,  that  the 
ecclesiastical  and  civil  institutions  are  united,  and  this  by  bonds  which 
it  must  require  some  violence  to  break. 

But  when  did  this  union  take  place  ?  How  was  it  brought  to 
pass  ?  Who  were  the  contractiug  parties  to  it  ?  On  all  these  ques- 
tions history  preserves  a  profound  silence.  It  records  no  meeting 
of  Sovereigns  and  Bishops  to  adjust  the  terms  of  the  fellowship  ; 
it  fixes  no  date  at  which  the  Church  began  to  say  it  would  acknow- 
ledge the  state,  or  at  which  the  state  said  it  would  acknowledge  the 
Church.  So  soon  as  we  find  the  Church  in  the  land,  we  find  her 
doing  homage  to  the  civil  powers,  such  as  they  were,  which  ruled 
the  land.  So  soon  as  the  Church  begins  to  exercise  its  own  peculiar 
influence,  the  civil  power  begins  to  feel  that  influence,  and  to  be 


532 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


moulded  by  it.  Then  indeed  we  meet  with  records  of  transactions 
between  these  two  bodies,  each  of  which  is  perceived  to  have  its 
distinct  representative,  and  its  peculiar  object,  though  neither  the 
representatives  nor  the  objects  are  defined  by  any  formal  line  of 
separation.  But  these  transactions  are  not  for  the  purpose  of  es- 
tablishing a  covenant  on  the  part  of  the  State,  that  it  will  protect 
the  Church,  or  on  the  part  of  the  Church,  that  it  will  do  certain 
services  for  the  State ;  far  rather  they  are  attempts  by  each,  either 
to  claim  a  portion  of  its  own  province  which  it  supposes  that 
the  other  has  invaded,  or  to  conquer  a  portion  of  that  province 
of  which  the  other  has  hitherto  had  peaceable  possession.  They 
are  such  transactions  as  presuppose  a  real,  though  a  yet  imperfectly 
understood  relation,  not  such  as  could  have  been  produced  by  a 
compact,  or  had  the  least  tendency  to  create  one.  The  Church 
affirms,  that  it  has  a  right  to  assign  the  powers  and  jurisdiction  of 
its  own  Bishops  ;  the  State  maintains  that  Bishops  as  well  as  the 
rest  of  its  subjects  must  acknowledge  its  paramount  authority.  The 
Church  affirms  that  it  has  a  spiritual  government  altogether  distinct 
from  the  civil  government.  The  State  says  that  the  minister  of  the 
Church  must  submit  like  other  men  to  its  laws  and  its  tribunals. 
Every  impartial  and  thoughtful  reader  of  our  history,  feels  that  there 
is  a  right  and  a  wrong  in  each  of  these  pretensions  ;  that  Becket 
must  have  been  contending  for  a  principle,  that  Henry  must  have 
been  contending  for  a  principle.  The  resolution  of  our  annalists 
generally  to  choose  favourites,  and'  to  nickname  opponents,  the 
eagerness  of  young  readers  to  arrive  at  a  positive  conclusion  about 
every  matter  in  dispute,  the  obvious  injustice  of  those  (so  called) 
fair  critics,  who  try  both  parties  by  the  standards  of  their  own  time, 
and  of  course  condemn  both,  acquitting  and  exalting  only  them- 
selves and  their  own  wisdom,  may  hinder  us  from  acknowledging 
at  once  and  in  terms,  that  we  are  under  deep  obligations  to  these 
opposing  champions,  and  that  a  higher  power  was  working  out  its 
ends  by  the  help  of  both ;  but  we  all  feel  inwardly,  that  this  is  the 
case,  we  all  unconsciously  express  our  conviction  that  it  is  so  in 
one  set  of  phrases  or  another.  And  we  feel  also  in  a  remarkable 
way,  that  the  history  of  these  struggles  is,  if  not  the  history  of 
England,  yet  the  heart  and  centre  of  it,  whence  more  light  is  thrown 
upon  the  records  of  the  conflicts  between  Kings  and  Barons,  Nor- 


ITS  NATIONAL  SIDE. 


533 


mans  and  Saxons,  the  old  orders  and  the  new,  than  they  throwback 
upon  it.  Those  who  have  learnt  that  the  science  of  politics  is  not 
comprehended  in  the  theory  of  representation,  that  in  order  to  under- 
stand what  representation  means,  we  must  first  know  what  there  is 
to  represent,  have  perceived  that  in  these  civil  and  ecclesiastical 
disputes,  lies  the  inward  secret  which  we  have  need  to  investigate 
before  we  can  trace  its  working  on  the  surface  and  in  the  external 
machinery  of  Society. 

So  it  was  before  the  Reformation.  And  what  was  the  Refor- 
mation itself?  Its  opponents  of  both  classes  say  that  it  was  merely 
a  national  movement.  '  Henry  not  Cranmer  was  at  the  root  of  it. 
There  was  more  of  politics  in  it  than  of  religion.'  I  should  not 
use  such  language;  I  do  not  understand  their  distinction  between 
politics  and  religion.  But  I  believe  that  in  their  meaning  they  are 
right.  The  most  obvious  peculiarity  of  the  English  Reformation 
seems  to  be  this,  that  it  was  a  movement  originating  with  the  Sove- 
reign and  not  with  Theologians.  And  therefore  it  was  not  a  new 
movement,  but  one  of  a  series  of  movements.  Not  only  the  con- 
stitutions of  Clarendon,  made  in  the  days  of  a  rebellious  Sovereign, 
but  the  statutes  of  praemunire,  passed  in  the  time  of  some  of  the 
most  orthodox,  some  of  the  greatest  persecutors  of  Lollardism,  had 
attempted  to  cut  off  the  correspondence  of  the  Church  with  Rome. 
The  difference  in  the  reign  of  Henry  VIII.  was  simply  this,  that  a 
large  body  of  the  Bishops  and  Clergy  had  been  led  by  their  reli- 
gious feelings  to  desire  that  this  correspondence  should  be  broken 
off;  to  feel  that  the  English  Church  could  not  maintain  its  own 
position  unless  it  became  strictly  national ;  unless  it  abandoned  that 
subjection  to  a  foreign  Bishop,  which  the  state  had  always  wished 
it  to  abandon. 

And  what  has  been  the  state  of  things  since  the  Reformation  ? 
It  is  this  :  a  number  of  bodies  or  sects  have  gradually  grown  up  in 
the  country,  which  have  affirmed  that  the  principles  of  Protestant- 
ism were  not  asserted  with  sufficient  boldness  at  our  Reformation. 
We  stopped  short,  it  is  said,  at  a  certain  point.  We  retain  much 
of  the  papal  system,  which  the  other  Protestant  nations  have  thrown 
off.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Romanists  have  felt  that  the  English 
Reformation  was  more  fatal  to  the  maxim  upon  which  they  were 
habitually  acting,  than  the  reformation  in  any  other  quarter  had 


534 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


been.  There  was  a  hope  that  men  might  renounce  a  new  system 
of  opinions  and  adopt  an  old  one.  But  a  Church  which  had  affirm- 
ed the  principle  of  nationality,  which  had  come  to  an  understanding 
with  the  sovereign  of  its  own  land,  was,  to  all  appearance,  utterly 
incorrigible.  The  most  earnest  and  intelligent  Jesuits  who  came 
over,  perceived  that  this  was  a  condition  of  things  which  must  be 
changed,  not  merely  by  preaching,  but  by  plotting ;  many  of  them 
believed  that  the  best  hope  of  the  restoration  of  the  papal  power 
lay  in  the  triumphs  of  those  sects  which  professed  a  more  vehement 
Protestantism.  Another  curious  point  deserves  to  be  noticed  ;  the 
Puritan  body  was,  as  I  have  said  before,  essentially  Calvinistical. 
Calvinism  was  the  principle  of  its  life.  It  was  the  feeling  that  the 
English  Church  was  not  founded  upon  the  Calvinistical  idea  which 
gave  occasion  to  the  earliest  Puritan  movements.  And  yet  we 
imported  the  anti-Calvinistical  doctrine,  which  the  Puritans  after- 
wards identified  with  popery,  from  one  of  the  purely  Protestant 
countries  of  the  Continent.  Nay,  further,  it  was  not  till  we  had  a 
Scottish  king  upon  the  throne,  a  king  bred  under  Presbyterian 
preachers,  that  we  had  any  connexion  with  this  Arminian  system 
at  all.  It  is  to  this  king  that  wTe  owTe  a  very  marked  change  in 
our  position.  Elizabeth  had  troubled  herself  as  little  as  possible 
about  systems  of  opinion;  she  had  merely  endeavoured  to  assert 
her  position  as  a  national  sovereign.  James  could  only  look  upon 
every  subject  as  a  schoolman  and  a  pedant.  He  had,  indeed,  one 
living  practical  feeling  ;  he  had  been  disgusted  with  the  Presbyte- 
rian preachers,  and  had  found  that  their  power  practically  interfer- 
ed with  his.  But  he  had  no  sense  of  sympathy  or  connexion  with 
our  Church,  he  only  wished  that  the  Episcopalian  system  should 
prevail  against  the  Presbyterian.  And  this  system,  with  whatever 
belonged  to  it,  was  to  be  established  in  Scotland,  and  maintained 
here  by  the  efforts  of  the  state.  Both  in  Scotland,  therefore,  and 
in  England,  the  feeling  that  there  is  a  spiritual  power  distinct  from 
and  higher  than  the  mere  state  powrer,  wras  called  forth.  In  Scot- 
land this  spiritual  feeling  connected  itself  with  the  national  feeling. 
The  people  revolted  against  the  notion  of  a  prelacy  which  w7as  im- 
posed upon  them  by  England.  Here,  the  mixture  of  spiritual  with 
national  feelings  in  the  Puritan  produced  some  strange  anomalies. 
The  body  in  the  Commons'  House,  which  had  most  sympathy  with 


ITS  NATIONAL  SIDE. 


535 


Puritanism,  were  occupied  in  maintaining  the  old  forms  of  the 
national  constitution  against  the  royal  prerogative.  The  Puritan 
clergy  were  raising  their  voices  against  old  national  and  ecclesias- 
tical forms,  and  maintaining  the  rights  of  the  spiritual  man.  Mixed 
with  these  assertions,  however,  one  can  perceive  in  them  from  the 
first  a  desire  for  a  more  formal  and  systematic  divinity  than  had 
ever  existed  in  England  before.  At  length  they  triumph,  and  it  is 
their  business  to  realize  as  well  as  they  can  their  three  objects,  of 
upholding  the  liberty  of  the  subject,  which  had  been  asserted  by 
the  Long  Parliament;  the  superiority  of  Christians  to  outward  forms, 
which  had  been  maintained  by  their  preachers  against  Laud  and 
the  Bishops ;  and,  lastly,  the  all  importance  of  a  peculiar  theologi- 
cal system.  The  first  attempt  issued  in  the  establishment  of  a  mili- 
tary despotism  ;  the  second  led  to  the  rise  and  independence  of  the 
different  sects  which  revolted  from  the  stern  Presbyterian  govern- 
ment and  sought  to  maintain  freedom  of  conscience ;  the  last  effort 
was  embodied  in  the  deliberations,  decrees,  catechisms,  committees 
of  triers,  of  the  Westminster  Assembly.  It  is  a  grievous  thing  that 
English  Churchmen  should,  from  their  prejudices  and  partialities, 
refuse  to  study  the  history  of  this  remarkable  period  simply  and 
fairly,  looking  at  it  from  all  sides  and  all  points  of  view,  and  labour- 
ing to  do  justice  to  the  feelings  of  all  the  parties  who  were  con- 
cerned in  it.  For  it  is  when  thus  considered,  and  not  when  warped 
into  an  apology  for  some  ecclesiastical  hero,  or  into  a  sentence  of 
condemnation  upon  his  opponents,  that  it  illustrates  and  makes 
manifest  the  essential  relation  between  spiritual  and  civil  life,  and 
the  impossibility  of  destroying  that  relation  by  any  efforts  of  ours, 
however  unfriendly  and  uncomfortable  we  may  make  it. 

The  Westminster  Assembly  had  done  their  best  to  establish  an 
uniformity  of  opinions ;  that  wherein  they  had  left  their  ministers 
free,  was  in  their  modes  of  worship.  The  opposite  principle  had 
been  the  one  hitherto  recognised  in  England.  The  bond  of  national 
fellowship  had  been  supposed  to  be  the  bond  of  worship  :  men  who 
had  books  and  leisure  might  occupy  themselves  with  the  study  of 
opinions.  I  do  not  know  how  far  the  Episcopal  clergy  at  the  Resto- 
ration were  aware  that  this  was  the  question  at  issue  between  them 
and  their  opponents  ;  possibly  they  were  not ;  possibly  they  looked 
upon  it  merely  as  a  question  whether  the  nation  should  adopt  a  more 


536 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


or  less  comprehensive  system.    But  if  so,  their  old  habits  were 
stronger  than  their  theories ;  the  state  felt  that  it  could  not  trouble 
itself  about  shades  of  opinion,  but  that  old  forms  of  worship  were 
practical  and  general,  and  there  was  One  over  us  who  saw  further 
than  either  statesmen  or  churchmen.    At  all  events,  this  was  the 
result.    The  act  of  uniformity  in  worship  was  the  substitute  for  the 
efforts  at  a  dogmatic  uniformity,  which  belonged  to  the  genius  of 
Presbyterianism.    The  immediate  effect  of  that  measure,  was  the 
separation  of  the  Puritan  clergy  from  that  which  was  now  again 
recognised  as  the  national  Church.    Then  began  various  stupid 
efforts  on  the  part  of  the  state  to  silence  them,  or  to  coerce  them 
into  an  union,  mixed  with  various  royal  experiments  at  a  general 
liberty  of  conscience  which  should  include  Romanist  as  well  as  Pro- 
testant Dissenters.    The  resistance  to  these,  marks  the  strong  sense 
of  the  people  and  of  the  parliament  that  Romanism  was  something 
anti-national.    This  feeling  was  strong  in  the  minds  of  the  seven 
Bishops  who  refused  to  read  James's  declaration.    They  believed 
that  the  act  of  the  king  was,  as  it  proved  to  be,  suicidal.  Several 
of  them  could  not,  however,  follow  out  that  principle  to  what  seems 
to  me  its  legitimate  consequence  ;  that  when  the  king  did  commit 
his  act  of  legal  suicide  by  deserting  the  country,  he  was  as  one 
lying  under  a  sentence  of  deposition  from  God  himself,  for  having 
violated  the  covenant  by  which  he  held  his  power.    The  Conven- 
tion Parliament  took  that  pious  view  of  the  matter,  and  accordingly 
inquired,  not  what  person  they  might  by  their  own  power  or  in  con- 
formity with  the  people's  will,  choose  into  his  place,  but  who  seemed 
to  be  designated  to  the  office  by  the  providence  of  God.*    At  no 
period,  I  think,  was  the  religious  character  of  the  English  state  more 
distinctly  asserted  than  at  this  ;  and  at  no  time  was  it  more  impor- 
tant that  it  should  be  asserted.   For  now  was  beginning  that  change 
in  the  habits  and  feelings  of  men,  here  as  well  as  elsewhere,  to 
which  I  adverted  in  my  first  part ;  the  change,  I  mean,  from  the 
notion  of  government  as  grounded  upon  deep  mysterious  principles, 
to  the  notion  of  it  as  the  result  of  mere  commercial  arrangements — 
of  some  imaginary  artificial  compact.    That  this  change  has  been 
productive  of  very  mischievous  effects  to  the  Church  and  the  nation 

*  See  the  celebrated  passage  jn  Burke's  Reflections,  wherein  he  replies  to  the 
sermon  of  Dr.  Price  upon  the  subject. 


ENGLISH  FORM  OF  CHARACTER. 


537 


of  England,  I  shall  have  occasion  presently  to  remark.  That  it 
has  led  to  any  legislative  acts  which  involve  a  formal  or  a  virtual 
violation  of  the  union  between  the  ecclesiastical  and  the  civil  bodies, 
I  believe  is  a  notion  which  could  only  have  become  prevalent 
through  this  very  habit  of  mind.  We  have  supposed  the  Church 
and  the  state  to  be  knit  together  by  some  material  outward  terms 
of  agreement :  we  do  not  know  what  they  are ;  they  may  be  that 
the  state  shall  not  recognize  any  persons  as  its  subjects  who  are  not 
Churchmen  ;  in  other  words,  that  it  should  ignore  facts ;  they  may 
therefore  be  violated  by  acts  of  toleration,  repeals  of  test  laws, 
emancipation  of  Romanists.  I  do  not  express  any  opinion  about 
the  policy  of  one  or  other  of  these  measures ;  some  of  them  may 
have  been  inexpedient  measures  j  they  were  all,  I  should  conceive, 
defended  as  well  as  attacked  by  many  feeble  and  imperfect  argu- 
ments. But  I  do  think  that  it  requires  something  far  deeper  and 
more  subtle  than  any  such  measures,  to  destroy  an  union  which  has 
cemented  itself  by  no  human  contrivances,  and  which  exists  in  the 
very  nature  of  things.  By  carelessness,  ignorance,  faithlessness, 
immorality,  we  may  undermine  our  national  life,  and  to  these  perils 
it  is  continually  exposed.  But  the  acts  of  our  legislators  when  they 
are  evil,  are  in  general  but  reflexes  of  something  which  is  evil  in 
the  national  mind,  and  which  legislators  cannot  correct.  And  in 
general  they  are  better  than  could  at  all  be  expected  from  the  tem- 
per of  those  who  passed  them,  or  of  us  who  criticise  them.  Often- 
times the  very  errors  which  are  in  them,  and  the  mischievous  conse- 
quences to  which  they  lead,  may  become  our  teachers,  and  may  be 
far  more  profitable  to  us  than  the  success  of  our  opposition  to  them 
could  have  been.  And  therefore  I  am  naturally  led  from  the  con- 
sideration of  this  subject,  to  that  which  I  proposed  next  to  consider. 


SECTION  III. 

What  is  the  form  of  character  which  belongs  especially  to  Englishmen  ?  to  what  kind  of 
depravation  is  it  liable  ? 

From  what  1  have  said  already,  it  will  be  evident  to  the  reader 
that  I  believe  the  first  thoughts  of  men  upon  this  subject  to  be  well 
founded.     1  You  Englishmen  are  such  mere  politicians^  this  is  the 


538 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


ordinary  complaint  which  foreigners  make  of  us.     '  Alas !  how 
exclusively  we  are  devoted  to  politics,9  this  is  our  continual  groan 
concerning  ourselves.    The  proofs  of  the  position  are  manifold — 
none  more  striking  than  those  which  are  supplied  by  men  who  are 
determined  that  they  will  at  all  events  be  exempt  from  the  national 
disease ;  that  they  will  be  artists,  philosophers,  mystics — any  thing 
but  politicians.    Watch  them  well,  and  you  will  see  how  utterly 
impossible  it  is  for  them  to  realize  their  dream ;  how  continually 
some  speculation  about  the  organization  of  society,  some  practical 
effort  to  remodel  it,  mixes  with  their  high  and  serene  contempla- 
tions; how  fierce  and  restless  the  contemplators  become,  from  the 
very  effort  to  keep  themselves  from  all  contact  with  the  fever  and 
restlessness  which  they  suppose  to  be  inherent  in  the  English  char- 
acter, and  wThich  they  know  are  in  their  own.    Other  cases  there 
are,  of  another  kind,  which  confirm  the  same  fact  still  more  re- 
markably.   I  have  known  persons  who  possessed  no  practical  tal- 
ent whatever,  all  whose  attempts  at  action  were  of  the  most  ludi- 
crously and  painfully  abortive  kind,  who,  if  they  tried  to  realize 
some  fine  conception  of  their  own,  were  sure  either  to  render  it 
contemptible  by  their  failure,  or  else  very  soon  to  run  into  one  of 
the  old  ruts  from  which  they  had  been  labouring  with  all  their  might 
to  extricate  themselves.    And  yet  such  Englishmen  as  these,  who, 
if  they  have  any  gifts  at  all,  seem  to  be  exclusively  endowed  with 
those  which  are  most  un-English,  feel  themselves  just  as  much 
compelled  to  be  political  and  practical  as  their  countrymen.  They 
find  it  impossible  to  think  unless  they  can  in  some  way  or  other 
connect  their  thoughts  with  action,  and  despairing  of  any  such  al- 
liance in  their  own  persons,  they  try  whether  they  may  not  at  least 
be  able  to  point  out  a  method  of  action  to  others,  aspiring  to  no 
other  fame  than  that  of  the  whetstone  : 

"  acutum 

Reddere  quae  ferrura  valet,  exsors  ipsa  secandi." 

But  though  these  arguments  are  very  decisive,  I  cannot  but^think 
that  there  are  others  which  are  more  cheering.  Why  do  wre  turn 
to  the  literature  of  the  reign  of  Queen  Elizabeth  as  to  that  which 
most  represents  the  genius  of  our  nation,  as  that  which  most  shows 
of  what  we  are  capable  ?  Why  but  because  in  every  department 
it  was  more  historical,  more  political,  than  it  has  been  at  any  time 


ENGLISH  FORM  OF  CHARACTER. 


539 


since.  Look  at  our  drama,  how  it  draws  its  highest  inspirations 
from  the  old  records  of  our  national  life.  See  how  needful  it  was 
even  for  the  allegorical  poet,  the  singer  of  1  Fairy  Land/  when 
dealing  with  his  twelve  moral  virtues,  and  the  battles  of  the  inner 
man,  to  interweave  a  history  of  Prince  Arthur,  and  to  confound  the 
image  of  Gloriana  with  that  of  Queen  Elizabeth.  With  all  their 
dreams  about  poetry,  and  scholarship,  and  philosophy,  how  evident 
it  is  that  the  deepest  and  most  earnest  thoughts  of  Sidney  and  Ra- 
leigh were  occupied  with  policy  and  politics.  What  nation  may 
not  be  able  to  show  profounder  works  in  exegetical  or  dogmatical 
divinity  than  we  ?  Who  can  hold  our  countrymen  pace,  when 
they  fashion  their  minds  to  the  consideration  of  the  laws  according  to 
which  God  has  formed  heavenly,  and  human,  and  natural  creatures  ? 

Hooker's  work  is  the  specimen  of  a  class,  though  certainly  the 
highest  specimen.  And  when  one  considers  it,  and  the  whole  life 
and  character  of  the  man  who  wrote  it,  I  think  we  must  feel  how 
very  little  excuse  lies  in  that  habit  of  mind  which  God  has  bestowed 
upon  us,  for  any  defect  in  meekness  and  gentleness,  in  superiority  to 
the  low  notions  and  canons  of  this  world,  in  converse  with  the  hier- 
archies of  heaven.  I  do  not  wish  to  exalt  this  form  of  character 
above  every  other ;  I  cannot  tell  whether  it  is  better  or  worse  than 
that  which  belongs  to  Frenchmen  or  Germans ;  I  know  only  that  it 
is  ours,  and  that  it  is  capable  of  being  expanded  into  that  which  is 
most  noble,  as  well  as  of  sinking  into  that  which  is  most  base. 

We  ought  to  contemplate  it  in  both  conditions,  that  we  may  not 
separate  hope  from  humiliation,  that  we  may  know  both  our  respon- 
sibilities and  our  temptations,  and  that  we  may  be  able  to  honour 
the  good  when  it  is  mixed  with  the  evil  which  lies  nearest  to  it. — 
Of  that  charity  we  have  need  in  every  part  of  our  history.  It  is  im- 
possible not  to  observe  a  tendency  in  the  English  Reformers  of  the 
sixteenth  century  to  a  kind  of  diplomacy  which  one  does  not  like  to 
perceive  in  holy  men,  and  which  it  is  very  easy  to  represent  as  per- 
vading the  whole  of  their  characters,  and  explaining  the  meaning 
of  their  acts.  Presently  after  you  find  them  suffering  with  a  con- 
stancy worthy,  their  detractors  say,  of  heroes,*  we  have  been  used 

*  Wherein  lies  the  distinction  between  a  hero  and  a  martyr  ?  I  should  presume  in  the 
feeling  of  the  first,  that  he  is  acting  by  some  power  and  energy  of  his  own  ;  of  the  latter, 
that  he  has  to  depend  upon  that  strength  which  is  perfected  in  weakness.    We  may  safely 


540 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


to  believe  and  think,  of  martyrs.  The  political  bias  of  their  mind 
did  not,  I  fancy,  tend  on  the  whole  to  lower  the  tone  of  it,  to  bring 
them  more  helplessly  into  contact  with  outward  things,  or  to  give 
them  less  faith  in  the  invisible.  Its  main  effect  was  to  lead  them  to 
think  of  Christ's  church,  as  a  Kingdom  rather  than  as  a  system  :  in 
the  dust  and  bustle  of  affairs  their  strong  conviction  that  this  king- 
dom was  a  reality  and  not  a  metaphor  may  have  led  them  to  forget 
that  it  is  the  type  of  all  kingdoms,  and  is  not  moulded  after  the 
maxims  of  any  even  of  those  which  confess  it,  and  do  homage  to  it. 
But  in  silence  and  suffering,  this  thought  gave  a  fixedness  and  sub- 
stantiality to  their  faith,  which  even  the  most  devout  schoolmen  are 
seldom  able  to  attain.  They  knew  that  it  was  a  Person  in  whom 
they  were  believing  ;  in  the  hour  of  trial  and  death  they  looked  di- 
rectly to  Him  and  not  to  any  dogma  or  system  of  dogmas,  for 
strength  and  consolation. 

That  this  way  of  considering  the  Church  is  an  eminently  Eng- 
lish one,  became  evident  in  the  time  of  the  civil  wars.  It  might  be 
said  to  characterize  every  class  of  thinkers.  It  was  at  first  less 
marked  in  those  among  whom  one  would  expect  most  of  it,  I  mean 
among  the  Episcopalians ;  for  the  systematic  tendency  had  become 
very  prevalent  through  the  influence  of  James  I.,  and  Laud  especial- 
ly seems  to  have  contracted  it.  His  faults  were  far  more  those  of 
a  schoolmaster*  or  a  collegian,  than  of  an  arrogant  and  usurping 
politician.  And  these  faults  made  him  especially  unable  to  deal 
with  the  energetic  national  impulses  of  that  period.  But  the  sense 
of  the  Church  as  a  kingdom  returned  to  the  Episcopalians  in  their 
hour  of  humiliation.  It  is  this  which  prevailed  in  the  mind  of  Jer- 
emy Taylor,  above  all  other  views.  In  spite  of  his  learning  and 
his  fondness  for  casuistry,  he  could  not  bear  to  contemplate  Chris- 
tianity as  a  system.  He  would  look  upon  it  as  a  life,  but  then  it 
was  a  life  connecting  itself  with  an  order,  and  realized  in  that  kind 
of  dependence  which  a  subject  pays  to  his  sovereign,  rather  than 
that  which  a  pupil  renders  to  his  master.  Therefore  one  may  trace 
a  curious  point  of  sympathy  between  him  and  the  most  extreme 
mystics  and  spiritualists  of  that  age;  all  spoke  of  a  divine  king- 
appeal  to  the  discourses  and  letters  of  our  Reformers  in  prison,  to  decide  which  feeling  is 
most  characteristic  of  them. 

*  Mr.  Carlyle  has  made  this  remark,  in  his  Lectures  on  Hero  Worship. 


ENGLISH  FORM  OF  CHARACTER. 


541 


dom,  none  could  be  content  with  any  language  which  did  not  im- 
port it,  or  with  any  acts  which  did  not  endeavour  to  realize  it.  Even 
Milton,  who  was  a  star,  and  dwelt  apart,  was  in  the  last  age  of  his 
life  as  much  as  in  the  first,  dreaming  of  a  polity.  All  men  might 
be  kings  and  priests  in  his  commonwealth,  but  kings  and  priests 
they  were  to  be,  not  professors  and  doctors. 

But  we  must  look  at  another  side  of  the  picture.  When  the 
feeling  of  spiritual  life  and  spiritual  government  decayed,  as  we 
saw  it  did  decay,  in  the  latter  part  of  the  seventeenth  and  the 
beginning  of  the  eighteenth  century,  one  may  fancy  what  an  effect 
must  have  been  produced  upon  a  people,  whose  political  feelings 
were  the  deepest  which  they  had.  Our  literature  could  not  sep- 
arate itself  from  our  social  life.  It  was  a  mere  mockery  and  pre- 
tence when  it  tried  to  throw  itself  into  some  Arcadian  condition  of 
things.  It  had  always  been  real  and  homely,  and  such  it  must 
continue  to  be.  But  if  all  realities  had  become  conventions,  if 
what  was  homely  had  become  base,  we  need  be  at  no  loss  to  un- 
derstand the  necessary  limitations  of  our  best,  and  the  fearful  de- 
basement of  our  worst  literature  during  the  period  between  the 
Revolution  in  England  and  that  in  France.  The  degradation  of  our 
professed  statesmen,  the  loss  of  all  high  ends  in  their  policy,  the 
maxims  and  practices  which  have  made  Sir  Robert  Walpole's 
name  and  administration  immortal,  are  all  equally  explicable. 
Still  there  were  indications  of  English  strength,  and  of  the  di- 
rection which  that  strength  naturally  takes.  In  the  physical 
world,  men  are  busy,  either  about  the  mechanism  of  actual  things, 
or  about  God's  laws  and  order.  Either  study  was  most  fitted  to 
the  truest  and  noblest  part  of  our  character,  and  here  therefore 
there  were  true  and  wrorthy  results. 

But  the  commercial  activities,  and  the  scientific  discoveries  of 
this  age,  were  gradually  concentrating  an  immense  population  of 
human  beings  in  our  cities.  Who  were  caring  for  these  ?  The 
Church  possessed  some  prelates  of  high  and  even  comprehensive 
views,  many  humble  and  sincere  pastors  in  its  rural  districts  ; 
many  men  capable  of  thinking  vigorously  respecting  the  moral 
constitution  of  individuals  and  of  society.  In  general,  however,  its 
habit  of  mind  was  too  well  expressed  in  the  theory  of  Warburton 
respecting  the  alliance  of  the  Church  and  State  ;  in  the  practice  of 

35 


542 


THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH. 


sending  bishops  to  Ireland  for  the  sake  of  supporting  the  English  in- 
terest. It  apparently  possessed  the  means  of  influencing  the  Aris- 
tocracy ;  but  the  Aristocracy  was  commonly  infidel.  It  should  have 
been  able  through  its  less  exalted  members  to  have  reached  the 
heart  of  the  trading  classes,  but  they  were  chiefly  under  the  influ- 
ence of  dissent ;  it  seemed  not  to  be  aware  that  the  new  class  of 
poor  men  was  coming  into  existence.  Undoubtedly  they  were  the 
members  of  the  National  Church  who  first  went  forth  to  evangelize 
the  mining  and  manufacturing  districts ;  but  their  movements  were 
regarded  with  any  thing  but  sympathy  by  the  rulers  of  the  Church ; 
no  pains  were  taken  to  give  them  a  right  direction.  Humble  and 
quiet  men  in  country  parishes  disliked  them  because  they  were  op- 
posed to  the  order  and  regularity  which  had  been  always  associated  in 
their  minds  with  the  idea  of  religion  ;  to  others  they  were  odious  be- 
cause they  appealed  to  feelings  which  were  dormant  in  themselves, 
but  which  were  found  to  exist  in  their  flocks.  Then  came  the 
French  revolution,  with  its  terrors'  and  warnings.  The  clergy  be- 
gan to  feel  themselves  less  mere  parts  of  an  obsolete  machinery 
existing  for  some  unintelligible  purposes;  more  necessary  to  the 
being  of  the  commonwealth.  The  aristocracy  began  to  acknow- 
ledge them  in  that  character.  Their  skepticism  vanished,  and  they 
spoke  of  religion  and  its  teachers  with  much  respect,  as  exerting 
those  influences  of  fear  and  hope,  which  could  alone  make  proper- 
ty and  government  secure.  Such  was  the  new  tone  which  the  char- 
acter and  patronage  of  George  III.,  and  the  dread  of  French  dis- 
organization, rendered  popular.  One  cannot  call  it  a  very  eleva- 
ted tone.  So  long  as  the  war  lasted,  it  was  mixed  with  much  that 
was  generous  and  patriotic  in  the  upper  classes  of  laymen ;  the  por- 
tion of  the  clergy  who  shared  in  it  became  active  magistrates,  care- 
ful of  their  domestic  and  relative  duties,  zealous  in  defence  of  that 
which  seemed  to  them  old  and  English.  With  these  useful  dispo- 
sitions were  connected  a  tendency  to  maintain  customs  and  practices, 
simply  because  they  did  exist,  and  could  allege  some  moderate  pre- 
scription in  their  favour ;  an  acquiescence  in  the  maxims  of  society- 
even  when  they  seemed  to  be  at  variance  with  the  higher  morality  ; 
a  great  impatience  of  enthusiasm  and  mysticism,  and  all  that  can- 
not be  at  once  brought  under  the  rules  of  existing  convention  or  ob- 
vious expediency ;  a  suspicion  of  any  great  efforts  of  active 


ENGLISH  FORM  OF  CHARACTER. 


543 


virtue  and  self- sacrifice ;  a  feeling  that  the  Church  is  bound  to 
sympathize  with  the  aristocracy,  and  to  overlook  its  sins,  for 
the  sake  of  preserving  good  order  among  the  people;  a  strong 
sense  of  the  service  which  subjects  owe  their  rulers,  without  any 
corresponding  sense  of  the  service  which  rulers  owe  to  their  sub- 
jects; an  inclination  to  assert  the  privileges  of  clergymen,  chiefly 
by  treating  it  as  a  rudeness  that  any  infidel  notions  should  be 
broached  in  their  presence;  great  anxiety  for  a  state  encourage- 
ment of  religion  on  the  ground  that  otherwise  it  was  not  likely  to 
thrive,  or  to  enlist  fashion  and  opinion  of  the  world  on  its  side  j 
a  vehement  dislike  of  dissenters,  as  disturbing  the  quietness  and  reg- 
ularity of  society,  and  as  introducing  something  of  vulgarity  into  re- 
ligion ;  a  certain  anger  and  restlessness  at  the  discover}'  of  any  new 
doubts  respecting  the  English  Church  or  Christianity,  which  could 
not  at  once  be  removed  by  an  application  of  the  arguments  used  on 
behalf  of  Establishments  in  Paley's  Moral  Philosophy,  and  of  the 
Gospel  in  his  Evidences. 

Now  the  spirit  of  this  State  Churchmanship  was  evidently  the 
spirit  of  an  age  of  our  national  Church,  not  of  the  Church  itself. 
That  continued  to  express  itself  in  the  Liturgy  ;  and  when  it  required 
a  dogmatical  language,  in  the  Articles.  The  younger  and  more 
active  members  of  the  Church  soon  became  conscious  of  the  contra- 
diction. They  began  to  seek  for  some  System  which  should  be  a 
refuge  from  the  dreariness  of  political  Anglicanism.  What  they 
have  found  is  our  next  inquiry. 


CHAPTER  II. 


MODERN  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


SECTION  I. 

The  Liberal  System. — The  Evangelical  System.— The  High  Church  or 
Catholic  System. 

1.  'See!'  exclaims  the  liberal,  taking  his  view  of  this  English 
orthodoxy  from  that  side  on  which  it  presents  itself  as  the  antago- 
nist of  change  and  improvement, '  see  what  a  hopeless  class  of  peo- 
ple these  old  pillars  of  the  Church  are !  How  can  it  stand  if  it  is 
to  be  supported  by  such  maxims  as  these  ?  Is  not  every  thing 
moving  about  us,  and  can  we  determine  to  remain  stationary  ? 
Opinions  upon  every  subject  are  undergoing  revolution,  and  we 
think  that  our  Articles  and  Formularies  can  be  kept  as  they  are  ! 
How  can  you  be  so  foolish  as  not  to  perceive  that  the  Dissenters 
will  grow  upon  us,  and  ultimately  overwhelm  us,  unless  we  discover 
some  scheme  for  comprehending  them  ?  And  then,  there  is  that 
body  of  Romanists  in  the  midst  of  us ;  why  are  you  determined  to 
look  upon  them  as  if  they  belonged  to  the  days  of  Gregory  the 
seventh  or  Innocent  the  third  ?  Why  not  make  them  your  friends, 
by  assuming  that  they  are  so  ?  Why  not  throw  overboard  your 
prejudices,  and  enter  at  once  and  heartily  into  the  spirit  of 
the  age  V 

2.  In  quite  other  language  did  the  Evangelical  complain  of  the 
spirit  which  animated  the  members  of  the  old  school ;  '  They  have 
lost  sight  of  all  spiritual  influences  and  realities  :  a  dry  notion  of 
human  merit  is  at  the  bottom  of  all  their  thoughts  and  teachings. 
They  expect  men  to  get  to  heaven  by  being  baptized,  and  by  lead- 
ing good  and  respectable  lives ;  the  principle  of  faith  is  forgotten 
altogether.  The  power  of  the  Gospel,  as  a  message  of  peace  to 
man,  is  not  felt  or  regarded.  Another  bond  of  union  than  that  of 
spiritual  fellowship  with  Christ  is  set  up ;  hence  holy  Dissenters  are 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


545 


denounced,  ungodly  Churchmen  fraternized  with.  Restore  the 
doctrines  of  our  Articles ;  preach  the  Gospel  in  season  and  out  of 
season ;  this  is  the  only  way  to  improve  the  condition  of  things 
among  us,  to  remedy  the  mischiefs  which  the  indifference  of  the 
last  age  has  produced.' 

3.  '  Alas  I'  cry  those  members  of  the  English  Church  who  wish 
to  be  called  catholics,  '  miserable  comforters  are  ye  all.  It  is  true 
that  our  English  orthodoxy  is  very  bad  ;  you  liberals  and  evangeli- 
cals will  introduce  something  which  is  a  thousandfold  worse.  The 
error  of  those  whom  you  attack  is,  that  they  thought  they  were 
members  of  a  nation  rather  than  members  of  a  Church ;  that  they 
were  to  follow  the  maxims  of  their  own  day,  and  not  recall  the 
maxims  of  better  days ;  that  they  were  to  look  up  to  the  State  as 
their  guide  and  authority,  instead  of  feeling  that  the  state  has  an 
object  altogether  different  from  ours,  that  at  certain  happy  mo- 
ments, under  some  godly  princes,  it  may  conform  itself  to  our 
teachings,  but  that  habitually,  and  at  this  time  above  all  others, 
it  is  our  jealous  foe,  and  aspires  to  be  our  tyrant.  The  Church  is  a 
body  which  may  combine  with  a  State,  or  rather,  submit  to  it,  but 
which  has  no  natural  connexion  with  it.  It  has  divine  sacraments, 
an  apostolic  order,  a  power  of  binding  and  loosing ;  the  practice 
and  rules  of  the  age  of  the  Fathers  are  her  model,  to  these  she  must 
be  ever  seeking  to  adapt  herself.  She  must  reject  communion  with 
the  Dissenters  in  this  country,  not  because  they  want  the  privileges 
of  the  state,  but  because  they  have  cut  themselves  off  from  the  uni- 
versal Church  ;  renouncing  her  orders — counterfeiting  her  sacra- 
ments. She  must,  in  like  manner,  repudiate  those  Protestants 
abroad  who  have  separated  from  and  abandoned  the  succession ; 
she  must  aspire  after  union  with  the  orthodox  Greeks  and  Latins, 
but  must  be  content  to  wait  till  we  or  they  are  prepared  for  this 
union.  At  home  we  must  labour  to  assert  the  worth  of  sacraments, 
to  introduce  discipline  for  the  purpose  of  preserving  baptismal  puri- 
ty in  our  children,  and  giving  repentance  to  those  who  have  lost  it; 
of  cutting  off  those  who  hold  schismatical  or  heretical  notions  under 
the  garb  of  Churchmen.  We  must  stir  men  up  to  a  more  exact 
and  religious  life,  encourage  them  to  do  good  works,  and  to  expect 
heavenly  rewards  for  them.  We  must  urge  our  disciples  to  retire- 
ment from  the  world,  to  penances  and  mortifications ;  we  must 


546 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


preach  repentance  as  the  only  way  of  "recovering  the  privileges  of 
Churchmen,  which  were  given  once,  but  which  most  men  lose 
through  sin  ;  we  must  discountenance  every  exercise  of  private 
judgment,  except  in  the  matter  of  choosing  teachers ;  we  must 
advise  our  disciples  to  be  content  with  probable  conclusions,  as 
all  that  faith  requires,  and  bid  them  leave  certainties  to  men 
of  science.' 


SECTION  IL 

Reflections  on  these  Systems,  and  on  our  Position  generally. 

These  are  the  main  outlines  of  the  three  systems  which  offer 
themselves  to  the  deliberation  of  the  young  English  theologian  in 
the  present  day.  He  is  told  by  the  supporters  of  each  that  he  must 
embrace  one  or  other  of  them.  All  his  attempts  to  incorporate  them 
into  each  other  have  been  very  vain.  It  seems  prodigious  arro- 
gance to  invent  a  scheme  of  his  own.  He  feels  that  he  cannot  fall 
back  upon  the  old  State  Churchmanship. 

This  fear  of  arrogance  is  surely  one  which  we  ought  to  encour- 
age in  ourselves,  and  in  every  other  person.  If  we  had  more 
humility,  we  should  probably  have  much  fewer  difficulties  to  en- 
counter than  we  have.  And  therefore  1  would  say,  if  I  had  any 
chance  of  being  heard,  Let  us  try  by  all  means  to  be  humble.  And 
that  we  may  not  be  otherwise,  do  not  let  us  hastily  set  ourselves  up 
to  condemn  any  of  these  systems,  or  those  who  propound  them. 
Our  consciences,  I  believe,  have  told  us  from  time  to  time  that  there 
is  something  in  each  of  them  which  we  ought  not  to  reject.  Let  us 
not  reject  it.  But  we  may  find,  that  there  is  a  divine  harmony,  of 
which  the  living  principle  in  each  of  these  systems  forms  one  note, 
of  which  the  systems  themselves  are  a  disturbance  and  a  violation. 
This  seemed  to  be  the  case  in  our  previous  inquiries  respecting 
Protestant  bodies  and  the  Catholic  Church ;  let  us  see  whether  our 
own  national  Church  presents  an  exception  to  the  rule,  or  an  illus- 
tration of  it. 

L  How  much  does  every  true  heart  respond  to  that  assertion  of 
the  Liberal,  that  if  our  Church  indeed  be  a  living  body,  it  cannot  be 
tied  down  by  the  system  of  a  particular  age,  it  must  have  an  expan- 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


547 


sive  power,  it  must  breathe  and  move  ;  it  must  be  able  to  throw  off 
the  results  of  partial  experiences,  it  must  be  able  to  profit  by  all 
new  experiences.  With  what  sympathy  do  we  listen  to  him,  when 
he  says  that  the  Church  is  meant  to  comprehend  and  not  to  exclude  > 
that  neither  Protestant  Dissenters  nor  Romish  Dissenters  should  be 
out  of  the  range  of  its  sympathies,  or  should  be  prohibited  from 
sharing  in  any  portion  of  its  benefits.  And,  now,  how  would  he 
accomplish  his  beautiful  conception  1  He  proposes  to  us  that  we 
should  abandon  the  prayers  which  we  have  derived  from  ages  gone 
by,  and  the  Articles  which  have  come  down  to  us  from  the  Reforma- 
tion ;  or  he  would  have  us  adapt  these  to  the  maxims  of  our  own 
time.  But  what  if  those  Prayers  should  be  the  very  means  by 
which  we  have  been  preserved  from  the  bondage  to  particular 
modes  and  habits  of  feeling,  when  they  have  been  threatening  to 
hold  us  fast  ?  What  if  those  Articles  have  kept  us  from  sinking 
into  a  particular  theological  system,  and  have  compelled  us  to  feel 
that  there  were  two  sides  of  truth,  neither  of  which  could  be  assert- 
ed to  the  exclusion  of  the  other  1  What,  if  the  abandonment  either 
of  the  Prayers  or  the  Articles,  or  the  reduction  of  them  to  our  own 
present  standards  of  thought,  should  bring  the  Church  into  the  most 
flat  and  hopeless  monotony,  should  so  level  her  to  the  superstitions 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  so  divorce  her  from  the  past  and  the  fu- 
ture, that  all  expansion  would  for  ever  be  impossible  ?  Again, 
how  would  he  accomplish  his  projects  of  comprehension  ?  He 
would  take  away  this  and  that  thing  about  which  we  and  the  Dis- 
senters differ,  till  at  last  he  discovered  a  few  common  principles 
upon  which  we  might  all  agree.  But  what,  if  the  peculiar  feelings 
and  sentiments  of  each  class  of  Dissenters,  be  those  in  which  their 
most  living  feelings  are  expressed  ?  What,  if  all  plans  of  compre- 
hension have  failed,  just  because  the  best  and  most  earnest  men 
were  those  who  saw  most  the  importance  of  that  which  was  to  be 
given  up  ?  If  these  suppositions  should  be  true,  we  must  look 
somewhere  else  than  to  a  liberal  system,  to  produce  the  effects  which 
Liberals  have  dreamed  of. 

•2.  With  what  truth  and  power  do  the  words  of  the  evangelicals 
come  home  to  us ;  that  the  loss  of  faith  was  the  great  misery  of  the 
last  age ;  that  outward  acts  usurped  the  place  of  life-giving 
principles;  and  that,  therefore,  outward  acts  were  poor  and  dead; 


548 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


that  if  a  vital  glow  were  restored  to  any  part  of  the  Church  at  the 
close  of  the  last  century,  it  came  from  the  feeling  that  God  had 
interfered  on  behalf  of  his  creatures,  and  was  interfering  on  behalf 
of  them  still ;  that  there  is  a  real  relation  between  the  creature 
and  the  Creator  ;  that  there  is  a  real  power  coming  forth  from  the 
Creator  to  succour  his  creatures,  and  to  enable  them  to  do  his  will. 
What  mighty  words  are  these  !  how  important  it  must  be,  as  the 
evangelical  says,  that  all  men  should  hear  them,  and  be  brought  to 
act  upon  the  conviction  of  their  truth  ! 

And  how  is  this  hope  to  be  realized  ?  Go  forth  and  tell  men, 
that  their  baptism  is  not  an  admission  into  the  privileges  of  God's 
spiritual  Church  ;  that  they  are  not  to  take  this  sign  as  a  warrant 
of  their  right  to  call  themselves  members  of  Christ,  and  to  pray  to 
God  as  their  Father  in  Him.  Go  and  tell  them  that  they  are  not 
in  a  real  relation  with  God,  but  only  in  a  nominal  one ;  go  and  tell 
them  that  if  they  are  ever  to  enter  into  that  relation  they  must 
bring  themselves  into  it  by  an  act  of  faith,  or  else  wait  till  an 
angel  comes  down  and  troubles  the  waters ;  go  and  tell  them  that 
the  Ecuharist  is  not  a  real  bond  between  Christ  and  his  members, 
but  only  a  picture  or  likeness,  which,  by  a  violent  act  of  our  will, 
we  may  turn  into  a  reality ;  go  and  make  these  comfortable  de- 
clarations to  men,  and  mix  them  well  with  denunciations  of  other 
men  for  not  preaching  the  Gospel ;  thus  you  will  fulfil  God's  com- 
mission, thus  you  will  reform  a  corrupt  and  sinful  land. 

3.  What  a  charm  lies  in  the  words  of  the  propounders  of  the 
Catholic  system ;  that  there  is  indeed  a  Church  in  the  world,  which 
God  himself  has  established ;  that  He  has  not  left  it  to  the  faith 
and  feelings  and  notions  of  men  ;  that  He  has  given  us  permanent 
signs  of  its  existence ;  that  He  has  not  left  us  to  find  our  way  into 
it,  but  has  himself  taken  us  into  it ;  that  being  in  it  we  are  under 
his  own  guidance  and  discipline;  that  we  are  not  bound  to  prove 
ourselves  members  of  it,  by  tests  which  exclude  others  who  share 
the  same  privileges  with  us ;  that  we  are  not  bound  to  form  our- 
selves into  circles  and  parties  and  coteries ;  that  we  belong  to  the 
Communion  of  Saints,  and  need  not  seek  for  another.  What  good 
tidings,  amidst  all  the  confusions  of  our  political  parties,  to  hear 
that  we  are  not  the  slaves  of  any  of  them ;  that  we  can  do 
without  the  State's  money,  or  the  State's  sword  j  that  we  have 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


549 


powers  of  our  own,  which  the  state  did  not  give  nor  can  take 
away. 

And  as  to  practical  matters,  how  evidently  true  we  feel  the 
assertion  to  be,  that  men  ought  to  be  called  to  repentance,  and  to 
do  good  works,  and  to  restrain  themselves,  and  to  offer  sacrifices 
to  God.  How  clear  it  seems,  that  the  evangelicals,  though  they 
may  wish  most  heartily  to  press  these  duties  upon  their  flocks,  are 
practically  unable  to  do  so ;  that  they  cannot  bid  the  members  of 
their  congregations  generally,  '  Arise  and  go  to  their  Father,'  be- 
cause they  will  only  allow  that  a  portion  of  them  may  call  God 
their  Father ;  and  because  that  portion  of  them,  according  to  their 
doctrine,  has  already  repented  and  turned  to  God  ;  that  they  can- 
not call  the  members  of  their  congregation  generally  to  do  holy 
acts  from  holy  principles,  because  they  do  not  believe  that  the 
majority  of  them  have  received  the  Spirit,  from  whom  all  holy  de- 
sires and  just  works  must  proceed. 

But  how  great  then  must  be  our  confusion  and  dismay,  when 
we  discover  that  the  preaching  of  repentance  and  of  good  works, 
is  just  as  impossible,  upon  the  Catholic  system,  as  upon  the  evan- 
gelical ;  that  the  congregations  of  the  one  are  to  be  treated  prac- 
tically as  if  they  had  lost  their  baptismal  rights,  just  as  the  congre- 
gations of  the  others  are  to  be  treated  as  if  they  had  never  ob- 
tained them  ;  that  repentance  and  moral  discipline  are  to  be  held 
forth  as  the  possible  means  of  recovering  a  treasure,  not  as  the 
fruit  of  shame  for  the  past,  and  precaution  against  the  future  abuse 
of  it ;  that  exhortations  to  good  works,  therefore,  must  of  necessity 
take  a  selfish  form,  and  be  confirmed  by  selfish  sanctions.  After 
all  those  splendid  assurances,  that  the  Church  really  exists,  and 
that  it  is  endowed  with  such  mighty  powers,  how  grievous  it  is  to 
find  the  most  strange  uncertainty  about  the  terms  under  which  she 
exists ;  whether  only  as  a  splendid  dream,  whereof  the  record  is 
preserved  in  the  writings  of  the  Fathers,  and  which  may  some  day 
be  realized;  or  as  a  potentiality,  which  was  made  a  fact  dur- 
ing the  middle  ages  by  the  supremacy  of  the  Pope ;  or,  lastly,  as 
an  invisible  equatorial  line  between  Romanism  and  Protestantism ; 
a  line,  of  which  some  dim  traces  may,  from  time  to  time,  be  dis- 
covered, with  the  help  of  powerful  glasses,  in  our  English  history, 
but  which  has  gradually  been  lost  in  the  dark  ground  upon  one 


550 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


side  of  it.  And,  finally,  to  men  who  had  felt  the  intolerable  pride, 
and  the  real  slavery  of  those  notions  about  private  judgment,  which 
have  been  of  late  current  among  us,  how  painful  is  the  discovery, 
that  these  Catholic  denouncers  of  it  do  in  fact  justify  the  most  ex- 
travagant, self-conceited,  and  unreasonable  use  which  has  ever 
been  made  of  it ;  and  only  condemn  it  when  it  has  lost  its  evil 
character,  and  is  actually  exercised  under  moral  discipline  and 
government.  For  what  can  be  more  subversive  of  all  order  and 
government,  what  so  direct  an  outrage  upon  fact,  as  the  assertion, 
that  men  in  general  are  left  to  choose  their  teachers  ?  And  what 
so  subversive  of  the  very  idea  of  a  teacher,  as  the  notion  that  he  is 
not  to  cultivate  the  mind  and  judgment  of  his  pupil,  but  only  to 
pour  into  him  certain  notions  of  his  own  ?  The  very  arrogance 
from  which  we  wish  to  deliver  men,  is  the  notion  that  they  are  not 
to  receive  the  teachers,  the  parents,  judges,  pastors,  whom  God  has 
set  over  them.  The  very  hope  we  wish  to  encourage  in  them  is, 
that  if  they  receive  humbly  the  light  which  is  vouchsafed  to  them, 
it  will  be  increased  to  them  more  and  more,  till  they  are  brought 
into  the  perfect  day. 

And,  lastly,  the  dogma  respecting  probable  evidence,  which 
the  Catholic  school  makes  the  foundation  of  their  intellectual,  as 
the  dogma  of  baptismal  purity  is  the  foundation  of  their  moral 
teaching,  seems  to  contain  the  very  virus  of  that  skepticism  which 
they  denounce  in  the  Liberal.  The  Liberal  says,  '  Nothing  is  cer- 
tain in  morals;  one  opinion  may  be  less  mischievous  or  more 
plausible  than  another  ;  but,  as  to  the  thing  which  dogmatists  call 
truth,  sensible  men,  who  know  any  thing  of  history,  have  discarded 
the  dream  of  it  altogether.'  And  what  says  our  English  Catholic: 
'  We  admit  nothing  is  certain  in  morals  ;  but  then  we  do  not  want 
certainty.  We  are  so  faithful  and  submissive  that  we  are  content 
with  appearances  and  likelihoods  ;  we  receive  what  we  are  told  by 
the  authority  which  we  have  determined  to  be  on  the  whole  the 
best.  God  has  not  willed  that  we  should  have  more  light.'  I  ap- 
peal to  the  conscience  of  mankind  against  this  language.  Do  we 
not  mean  when  we  use  the  awful  name  of  God,  'The  Being,  He 
who  is  V  If  there  be  no  certainty,  how  dare  we  take  that  name 
into  our  lips  ?  Are  not  the  very  words,  "  I  believe  in  God  the 
Father  Almighty,"  an  assertion  that  there  is  something  fixed  and 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


551 


eternal  upon  which  the  pillars  of  the  universe  rest  ?  Do  not  the 
next  words  mean,  '  He  who  Is  has  revealed  Himself  to  us  ?  We 
are  not  to  live  upon  probabilities  and  plausibilities.  He  who  is 
Truth  does  wish  that  we  should  know  the  truth,  and  that  the  truth 
should  make  us  free  V  I  do  therefore  say,  that  this  system,  so  far 
as  it  stands  upon  the  doctrine  of  probabilities,  begins  in  skepticism, 
and  that  in  skepticism  it  must  terminate. 

It  will  be  observed  that  I  have  not  charged  the  authors  of  these 
systems  with  the  tendencies  which  they  commonly  impute  to  each 
other.  I  have  not  said  that  the  Liberal  wishes  to  substitute  Ration- 
alism for  Orthodoxy;  that  the  Evangelical  wishes  to  establish  the 
principle  of  Dissent ;  that  the  Catholic  systematizer  wishes  to  intro- 
duce Popery.  My  charge  against  each  is,  that  he  defeats  his  own 
object.  As  to  the  question  how  far  these  different  accusations  are 
true,  I  should  be  obliged  in  many  cases  to  give  a  double  answer  in 
order  to  make  myself  intelligible.  I  can  quite  understand  that  each 
of  these  parties  believes  the  clear  and  strong  assertion  of  its  own 
principle  to  be  the  best  preservative  against  the  very  evil  which  it 
is  supposed  to  favour.  And  I  think  this  is  a  true  and  reasonable 
opinion.  I  think  the  Liberal  has  a  right  to  say,  'Recognise  the 
idea  of  Rationalism  in  the  Church,  and  it  will  not  assert  itself  out 
of  the  Church  in  the  form  of  Infidelity.'  That  the  Evangelical  has 
a  right  to  say,  1  Recognise  the  idea  of  personal  faith  as  the  condi- 
tion of  Christian  fellowship  in  the  Church,  and  it  will  not  assert  it- 
self in  the  form  of  Dissent  out  of  the  Church.'  m  I  think  the  Catho- 
lic has  a  right  to  say,  '  Recognise  the  idea  of  Catholicism  in  your 
Church,  and  it  will  not  assert  itself  out  of  the  Church  in  the  form 
of  Romanism.'  But  while  I  acknowledge  this,  and  therefore  can 
enter  into  the  feelings  of  disappointment  and  indignation  which 
each  in  turn  experiences  when  he  finds  that  his  purpose  is  not  un- 
derstood, I  must  say  also,  that  it  seems  to  me  evident  both  from  facts 
and  reason,  that  each  of  these  principles,  when  it  is  worked  into  a 
system,  does  become  fairly  obnoxious  to  the  complaint  of  those  who 
denounce  it  most  vehemently.  I  cannot  see  what  Church  Liberal- 
ism reduced  to  a  System  is,  but  the  denial  of  any  thing  as  given  to 
men  either  in  the  shape  of  Tradition  or  Revelation ;  what  Church 
Evangelicalism  reduced  to  a  System  is,  but  the  denial  of  the  very 
idea  of  Church  fellowship  or  Unity,  and  the  substitution  for  it  of  a 


552 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


combination  of  individual  units;  what  Catholicism  reduced  to  a 
System  is,  but  Romanism ;  that  is  to  say,  the  direct  denial  of  the 
distinction  of  National  Churches,  and  the  implicit  denial  of  the 
Church  as  a  spiritual  body  holding  a  spiritual  Head.  And  it  seems 
to  me  a  false  way  of  speaking,  to  say  that  each  of  these  systems  is 
good  in  moderation,  but  when  pushed  to  its  extreme  is  bad.  I  do 
not  think  the  system  is  the  extension  or  expansion  of  the  principle, 
but  its  limitation  and  contradiction.  I  do  not  see  how  the  principle 
can  be  carried  too  far.  I  do  not  see  how  any  thing  can  be  done 
towards  the  formation  of  the  System,  without  introducing  a  seed  of 
evil  which  must  germinate  till  it  produces  all  its  natural  fruits. 

I  have  written  very  much  in  vain,  if  I  have  not  yet  explained 
why  I  suppose  this  must  be  the  case.    These  systems,  Protestant, 
Romish,  English,  seem  to  me  each  to  bear  witness  of  the  existence 
of  a  Divine  Order;  each  to  be  a  miserable,  partial,  human  substi- 
tute for  it.    In  every  country  therefore,  I  should  desire  to  see  men 
emancipated  from  the  chains  which  they  have  made  for  themselves, 
and  entering  into  the  freedom  of  God's  Church.    But  it  seems  to 
me,  that  in  England  we  have  a  clearer  witness  than  there  is  any- 
where, of  our  right  to  this  emancipation,  and  of  the  way  in  which 
it  may  be  effected.    This  system  building  is  not  natural  to  us.  We 
have  evils  which  are  natural  to  us,  and  against  which,  we  have  to 
be  continually  on  our  guard.    But  this  is  an  exotic  product :  one 
of  the  charges  which  the  Liberal  and  Evangelical  and  Catholic  sys- 
tematizes make  against  our  native  English  divines  is,  that  they 
have  little  understanding  of  any  systems;  that  they  go  on  in  a  blind 
mechanical  course,  merely  caring  to  keep  their  places  and  do  their 
work.    And  yet  the  members  of  all  these  parties  are  continually 
giving  proof,  when  they  are  not  occupied  with  actual  controversies, 
that  they  feel  this  maxim  of  "  keeping  their  places,  and  doing  their 
work,"  to  be  not  a  low  or  grovelling  one ;  but  one  which  their  con- 
sciences testify  in  favour  of,  and  to  which  they  would  wish,  if  they 
could,  to  conform  themselves.    As  they  become  more  aged  and 
holy,  more  disciplined  by  affliction,  more  apprehensive  of  God's 
will  and  of  the  ends  which  they  are  to  seek,  it  would  seem  as  if 
this  old-fashioned  notion,  which  struck  them  as  so  vulgar  and  earthly 
in  their  youth,  is  more  and  more  acknowledged  to  be  one  high  in 
its  origin,  and  difficult  in  its  realization.    An  old  systematizer  in 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


553 


England  is  a  very  rare  spectacle  indeed.  There  is  either  a  gravi- 
tation into  some  lower  region,  or  an  ascent  into  some  higher  one; 
either  a  fall  out  of  the  middle  air  of  speculations  to  our  mother 
clods ;  or  a  clear  perception  that  the  heavenly  things  are  substan- 
tial, and  that  in  the  solid  earth  and  not  in  the  clouds,  we  are  to  find 
the  images  of  them.  I  should  be  very  presumptuous  if  I  spoke  to 
such  men,  except  in  the  language  of  deference  and  humility,  be- 
seeching them  not  to  make  us  that  which  they  have  ceased  to  be 
themselves;  not  to  let  us  fancy  from  their  words  that  they  belong 
to  schools  and  parties,  when  we  know  that  in  their  closets  and  in 
their  lives  they  must  be  renouncing  them  all.  It  is  from  the  ranks 
of  young  men  that  these  parties  will  be  recruited.  They  want,  as 
they  say,  principles  and  ideas.  They  cannot  move  on  in  the  line  of 
mere  practical  business  and  exertion.  They  must  know  why  they 
act  and  what  is  the  end  of  action,  or  they  will  not  act  at  all.  I 
think  I  am  as  sensible  of  this  necessity  as  they  can  be ;  and  sensi- 
ble too,  how  little  their  elders  are  able  to  sympathize  in  the  want, 
or  to  satisfy  it.  Nay,  I  think  I  can  see  further,  that  unless  we  who 
are  younger  do  earnestly  seek  after  principles  and  grounds  of  action, 
we  must  sink  into  the  monotony  of  the  last  century,  or  into  a  far 
worse  state  than  that.  I  believe  the  great  principles,  which  each 
of  these  systems  has  developed,  have  been  made  known  to  us  for 
the  wisest  purposes.  But  then  I  think  that  they  are  the  sap  which 
is  to  invigorate  and  restore  the  oak  trunk  which  has  been  standing 
for  so  many  ages  on  our  soil,  and  that  the  seedlings  which  they 
themselves  have  sent  forth,  are  of  a  poor,  weak,  tortuous  growth, 
noi  capable  of  resisting  any  tempest.  I  do  not  urge  the  young  Eng- 
lish student  to  make  light  of  these  principles;  1  say  he  cannot  with 
safety  make  light  of  any  one  of  them.  All  belong  to  him,  he  has 
need  of  them  all ;  but  I  beseech  him  to  consider  solemnly,  and  as 
in  the  presence  of  God,  whether  he  may  lawfully  do  any  acts  which 
imply  that  he  adopts  one  of  the  systems  in  which  these  principles 
are  buried,  and  whether  he  dares  to  fraternize  with  any  parties,  as 
parties,  which  profess  them. 

He  will  be  told,  of  course,  that  to  stand  aloof  from  them  is 
practically  impossible ;  that  to  attempt  it  is  an  act  of  self-conceit 
and  self-will ;  that  he  is  an  Eclectic  or  a  Syncretist ;  that  in  a 
short  time  if  he  perseveres  in  his  determination  he  will  throw  off 


554 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


his  faith  altogether.  To  the  first  charge  he  may  reply,  that  it  can- 
not be  impossible  for  an  Englishman  to  be  that  which  it  is  the 
natural  bias  of  an  Englishman,  not  under  some  peculiar  influence, 
to  be.  To  the  second  he  will  answer,  that  instead  of  rejecting  the 
instructions  of  his  parents  and  teachers,  he  is  seeking  to  hold  them 
fast.  Possibly  they  belong  to  a  particular  school.  His  first  im- 
pulse on  beginning  to  think,  is  to  emancipate  himself  from  their 
notions,  to  choose  new  teachers,  to  adopt  the  system  which  is  most 
opposite  to  that  of  his  education.  Those  who  beseech  not  to  join  a 
party  say,  '  By  no  means  do  this ;  the  notions  which  you  have 
learnt  must  not  be  abandoned;  there  is  a  truth  in  them  which  you 
must  have  ;  never  let  them  go  till  you  have  made  yourself  master 
of  it ;  when  you  are  master  of  it,  do  what  you  like  with  the  sys- 
tem ;  you  will  love  those  who  taught  it  you  more  than  you  ever 
did ;  you  will  only  not  suffer  their  teachings  to  keep  you  separate 
from  men  whom  you  ought  also  to  love.'  The  accusation  of  Eclec- 
ticism or  Syncretism  it  is  better  not  to  notice  at  all ;  nine  out  of  ten 
persons  who  use  the  words,  do  not  know  what  they  mean ;  they 
are  merely  bugbears  to  frighten  children  with :  the  tenth  man  who 
does  know,  will  understand  that  he  who  endeavours  to  substitute  a 
Church  for  systems,  must  regard  with  most  dread  and  suspicion  the 
attempt  at  a  complete,  all-comprehending  system.  Hating  all 
systems,  he  hates  those  most  which  are  most  perfect,  because  in 
them  there  are  the  fewest  crannies  and  crevices  through  which  the 
light  and  air  of  heaven  may  enter.  He  hates  the  Romish  system 
more  than  all  Protestant  systems,  because  the  latter  are  inconsist- 
ent and  fragmentary,  the  former  is  all-embracing  and  satisfactory, 
therefore  more  lifeless,  inhuman,  godless.  As  to  the  fear  of  his 
losing  his  faith,when  he  has  thrown  down  the  party  walls  which  have 
been  raised  for  the  defence  of  it,  he  may  venture  to  stand  the  risk. 
If  his  faith  be  in  the  doctrines  of  men  and  not  in  the  wisdom  of 
God,  the  sooner  it  falls  the  better.  If  it  be  in  Him  whose  name  is 
Truth,  to  Him  be  the  care  of  it  committed.  We  believe  that  his 
sentence  has  gone  forth  against  systems  and  parties  :  we  do  not  be- 
lieve that  he  has  recalled  the  words,  *  None  who  trusteth  in  Me 
shall  be  confounded.' 

I  am  sure  our  responsibility  in  this  matter  is  becoming  more 
weighty  every  day.  I  have  said  that  these  systems  are  not  natural 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


555 


to  us.  But  I  do  not  mean  that  they  are  not  able  to  assimilate 
themselves  with  our  most  characteristic  tendencies.  Elsewhere  the 
defenders  of  a  system  may  merely  form  a  school.  In  England,  be- 
cause by  constitution  we  are  politicians  and  not  systematizers,  they 
must  form  a  party.  The  moment  we  have  adopted  a  peculiar  the- 
ory we  begin  to  organize.  We  have  our  flags  and  our  watchwords, 
our  chiefs  and  our  subordinates.  All  the  generous  feelings  of  sym- 
pathy and  courage,  of  readiness  to  support  a  friend,  of  unwillingness 
to  desert  him  when  he  has  done  some  unpopular  act,  bind  us  to  one 
and  another  maxim  which  our  leaders  or  allies  have  put  forth,  even 
though  there  is  nothing  in  our  own  minds  which  answers  to  it ;  we 
throw  the  feelings  befitting  men  of  action  and  soldiers,  into  the  de- 
fence of  propositions  which  have  been  worked  out  by  the  most  dry 
school  logic.  Thus  personality  necessarily  enters  into  all  our 
solemnest  discussions.  A  noble  symptom  of  what  we  ought  to  be  ! 
a  miserable  effect  when  we  are  striving  to  make  ourselves  some- 
thing else !  The  respectable  champions  on  each  side  ask,  and  ask 
again,  why  they  should  be  treated  with  harshness  and  malignity, 
for  maintaining  principles  which  they  believe  in  their  hearts  to  be 
charitable  and  true.  Immediately  after  their  Newspapers  and  Re- 
views are  seen  generously  striving  that  no  other  party  shall  have 
the  stigma  of  being  more  unfair  and  libellous  than  their  own.  What 
seems  to  me  worse  and  more  grievous  still— all,  whether  they  are 
capable  of  understanding  systems  or  not,  are  expected  to  enlist  in 
one  of  these  parties,  and  to  bear  its  name.  The  poor  must  be 
instructed  in  penny  tracts  to  call  such  a  man  a  Papist,  or  such  a 
man  a  Low  Churchman.  Our  children  must  become  polemics  be- 
fore they  can  repeat  their  catechism  ;  and  the  members  of  that  sex 
which  exists  to  pacify  and  harmonize  society,  to  be  a  witness 
against  our  cold  logical  habits  of  thought,  to  teach  us  the  worth  of 
things  above  words,  must  talk  about  opinions,  imitate  our  discords, 
pollute  their  minds  if  not  their  lips  with  the  ribaldry  which  we  think 
it  a  part  of  our  Christian  duty  and  profession  to  indulge  against 
those  who  are  called  by  the  same  name,  and  partake  of  the  same 
sacraments  with  us.  Surely  such  a  state  of  things  must  bring  down 
heavy  judgments  upon  our  Church  and  land,  and  therefore  every 
one  ought  to  consider  whether  he  will  make  himself  an  accessory 
to  the  sin,  whether  he  can  do  nothing  to  avert  the  punishment. 


556 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


I  am  aware  how  much  pains  the  defenders  of  party  have 
taken,  to  engage  the  practical  feelings  of  Englishmen  on  their 
side.  They  have  said, '  Let  theorists  talk  what  they  will,  the  mo- 
ment we  begin  to  act,  we  must  associate  with  some  men  or  other, 
and  this  association  will  assume  a  party  character.  To  bid  us 
abandon  parties  and  systems,  is  only  another  way  of  bidding  us 
hang  down  our  hands  in  stupid  indolence.  Those  who  wish  to  do 
any  thing  must  be  content  to  take  things  as  they  find  them.'  Yes, 
this  is  undoubtedly  the  right  test,  I  rejoice  that  we  should  be 
brought  to  it.  I  leave  then  to  the  defenders  of  systems  and  parties, 
to  explain  what  we  are  doing  with  them.  They  cannot  complain 
that  their  machinery  is  not  in  active  operation.  It  may  occasion- 
ally meet  with  a  little  obstruction  from  a  certain  vague  impression 
in  men's  minds,  that  they  have  been  commanded  to  love  their 
neighbours  as  themselves ;  still  they  cannot  be  so  ungrateful  as 
not  to  acknowledge  that  it  has  been  broug  ht  to  very  tolerable  per- 
fection, and  of  course,  to  very  great  efficiency  in  this  nineteenth 
century  in  our  English  towns  and  villages.  Any  description  of  its 
results  from  an  opponent  could  not  be  a  fair  one.  I  will  therefore 
confine  myself  to  a  short  statement  of  certain  modes  of  action  which 
I  believe  are  open  to  a  person  who  does  not  avail  himself  of  this 
machinery,  but  is  content  with  the  powers  which  he  believes  God 
has  bestowed  upon  him,  as  a  minister  of  his  Kingdom. 

1.  Does  such  a  person  find  himself  among  the  members  of  dif- 
ferent sects  and  parties — a  Quaker  here,  a  Baptist  there,  a  Unita- 
rian on  his  right,  a  Plymouth  Christian  on  his  left?  He  believes 
that  he  is  the  member  of  a  polity  which  recognises  the  truth  con- 
tained in  each  of  these  systems;  that  they  have  made  a  system 
out  of  some  principle  which  they  have  torn  apart  from  the  rest; 
that  they  have  destroyed  that  principle  by  its  separation.  He  be- 
lieves that  there  are  earnest  men  in  these  sects  who  are  feeling  this 
to  be  the  cause,  who  are  catching  at  all  schemes  of  union  because 
they  feel  it,  who  are  angry  with  us  because  we  do  not  enter  into 
their  sense  of  the  necessity  of  a  union,  and  therefore  fraternize  with 
them ;  who  are  proclaiming  the  very  principle  upon  which  the 
Catholic  Church  stands,  that  all  unity  is  to  be  in  Christ,  and  that 
intellectual  notions  and  opinions  ought  not  to  divide  men  from  Him. 
There  is  therefore  a  practical  renunciation  of  the  sect  principle,  as 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


557 


something  which  is  no  longer  tenable.  There  is  at  the  same  time 
a  very  furious  desire  to  maintain  it  as  against  the  national  Church. 
The  reasons  will  seem  to  him  to  be  these.  First,  the  Church  has 
put  itself  forth  merely  as  an  English  Church.  Its  character  as  a 
Catholic  body,  as  a  kingdom  set  up  in  the  world  for  all  nations, 
has  been  kept  out  of  sight.  Secondly,  in  the  reaction  against  this 
tendency,  it  has  taken  a  negative,  i.  e.  a  sectarian,  form.  The  idea 
of  the  Church,  as  a  united  body,  has  been  put  forth,  chiefly  to  show 
the  wickedness  of  those  who  have  separated  from  it.  Its  episco- 
pacy and  its  sacraments  have  been  looked  upon  chiefly  as  exclusive 
of  those  who  have  them  not.  Above  all,  the  spiritual  character  of 
the  Church  as  deriving  its  life  from  its  head,  a  character  which  the 
Dissenters  are  especially  disposed  by  their  professions  to  recognise, 
has  been  disjoined  from  the  institutions  which  embody  it.  Men 
have  been  asked  to  receive  these  institutions  merely  as  such,  and 
then  to  hope  for  spiritual  life  through  them.  Little  attempt  has 
been  made  to  prove  to  them  that  the  institutions  are  themselves 
living  portions  of  the  divine  kingdom.  A  person  therefore  who 
has  entered  into  these  convictions  himself,  will  not  despair  of  see- 
ing all  the  true  hearty  Dissenters  gradually  receiving  them  also. 
He  will  not  be  impatient  to  force  any  notions  of  his  own  upon 
them.  His  desire  will  be  to  meet  their  feelings  and  to  enter  into 
them.  He  will  be  most  anxious  not  to  destroy  any  thing  which 
they  have  received  or  learnt ;  to  confirm  them  in  their  feelings  of 
affection  and  reverence  for  their  fathers ;  to  strengthen  in  them  by 
all  means  the  hereditary  affections,  which  their  doctrines  respecting 
private  judgment  so  much  impair.  He  wishes  to  preserve  all  the 
faith  which  they  have  from  the  destruction  which  is  threatening  it ; 
to  unite  their  faith  with  that  of  those  from  whom  they  are  separat- 
ed ;  to  make  them  integral  members  of  the  body  from  which  they 
fancy  that  it  is  the  object  of  our  pride  and  selfishness  to  exclude 
them.  What  the  result  of  such  a  method  may  be  is  in  God's  hands, 
not  ours.  At  all  events  other  methods  have  been  tried  and  have 
failed,  this  has  not  been  tried. 

2.  Or  does  the  Churchman  I  am  supposing,  find  himself  in  one 
of  our  awful  manufacturing  districts  ?  Of  course,  the  sense  of  his 
own  utter  inadequacy  to  deal  with  the  mass  of  evil  which  he  meets 
there  is  the  first  which  will  take  hold  of  him,  and  will  grow  stronger 

36 


558 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


every  day.  Yet  he  is  there,  and  he  knows  that  there  is  One  who 
cares  for  this  mass  of  living  beings  infinitely  more  than  he  does. 
Nay,  his  own  coldness  and  heartlessness  will  continually  remind 
him  that  if  he  is  to  care  for  them  at  all,  the  feeling  must  be  com- 
municated to  him  by  Him  who  often  seems  to  these  unhappy 
creatures  utterly  heedless  of  their  sorrows  and  complainings.  And 
then  he  has  the  consolation  which  the  Athenian  orator  found  when 
he  reflected  on  the  reverses  of  his  countrymen,  and  the  resistless 
march  of  Philip.  '  Tf  we  had  done  such  and  such  things  and  they 
had  failed  we  might  despair ;  we  have  not  done  them,  therefore 
let  us  hope.'  A  Church  which  was  looked  upon,  and  almost  look- 
ed upon  itself,  as  a  tool  of  the  aristocracy,  which  compared  its  own 
orders  with  the  ranks  in  civil  society,  and  forgot  that  it  existed  to 
testify  that  man  as  man  is  the  object  of  his  Creator's  sympathy, 
such  a  Church  had  no  voice  which  could  reach  the  hearts  of  these 
multitudes.  The  Liberal  proclamation  which  says, i  Teach  them  ; 
impart  to  them  a  few  of  the  things  that  we  know,'  was  more  genial, 
and  humane.  But  there  are  thoughts  ever  at  work  in  these  English- 
men, in  these  human  beings,  thoughts  quickened  by  hunger  and 
suffering,  which  such  instruction  could  not  appease.  More  impres- 
sive far  was  the  speech  of  the  Methodist  and  the  Evangelical : 
6  You  have  immort  al  souls,  they  are  perishing,  oh !  ask  how  they 
may  be  saved.'  Such  words  spoken  with  true  earnestness  are  very 
mighty.  But  they  are  not  enough ;  men  feel  that  they  are  not 
merely  lost  creatures ;  they  look  up  to  the  heaven  above  them,  and 
ask  whether  it  can  be  true  that  this  is  the  whole  account  of  their 
condition ;  that  their  sense  of  right  and  wrong,  their  cravings  for 
fellowship,  their  consciousness  of  being  creatures  having  powers 
which  no  other  creatures  possess,  be  all  nothing.  If  religion,  they 
say,  will  give  us  no  explanation  of  these  feelings,  if  it  can  only  tell 
us  about  a  fall  for  the  whole  race,  and  an  escape  for  a  few  indivi- 
duals of  it,  then  our  wants  must  be  satisfied  without  religion.  Then 
begin  Chartism  and  Socialism,  and  whatever  schemes  make  rich 
men  tremble.  Surely,  what  the  modern  assertors  of  a  Church  sys- 
tem say  about  the  duty  of  administering  active  charity  to  these  suf- 
ferers, of  showing  that  we  do  not  merely  regard  them  as  pensioners 
on  the  national  bounty,  but  as  fellow  men  for  whom  we  are  to 
make  sacrifices — surely  this  language  is  far  more  to  the  purpose. 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


559 


Surely,  if  acted  upon  even  imperfectly,  it  must  produce  most  happy 
effects.  But  how  would  the  proclamation  to  our  Chartists  and 
Socialists,  that  they  had  baptismal  purity  once,  and  that  they  have 
lost  it  now ;  that  they  must  recover  their  ground  by  repentance,  by 
prayer  and  fasting  ;  that  they  must  submit  to  discipline,  and  be  de- 
prived of  privileges  which  they  never  exercised  nor  cared  for ;  how 
can  such  a  proclamation  as  this  meet  any  of  the  confused,  disorderly 
notions  which  are  stirring  in  thir  minds,  or  set  them  right  ? 

On  the  other  hand,  if  the  new  and  unwonted  proclamation 
were  to  go  forth, '  God  has  cared  for  you,  you  are  indeed  his  chil- 
dren ;  his  Son  has  redeemed  you,  his  Spirit  is  striving  wTith  you; 
there  is  a  fellowship  larger,  more  irrespective  of  outward  distinc- 
tions, more  democratical,  than  any  which  you  can  create  ;  but  it  is 
a  fellowship  of  mutual  love,  not  mutual  selfishness,  in  which  the 
chief  of  all  is  the  servant  of  all — may  not  one  think  that  a  result 
would  follow  as  great  as  that  which  attended  the  preaching  of  any 
Franciscan  friar  in  the  twelfth  century,  or  any  Methodfst  preacher 
in  the  eighteenth  ?  For  these  are  true  words,  everlasting  words, 
and  yet  words  which  belong  especially  to  our  time ;  they  are  words 
which  interpret,  and  must  be  interpreted  by,  that  regular  charity, 
that  ministerial  holiness,  those  sacraments,  prayers,  discipline,  of 
which  the  Catholic  speaks.  They  connect  his  words  about  repent- 
ance with  those  of  the  Evangelical,  making  it  manifest,  that  noth- 
ing but  an  accursed  nature  and  a  depraved  will,  could  have  robbed 
any  of  the  blessings  which  God  has  bestowed  upon  us  all.  They 
translate  into  meaning  and  life  all  the  liberal  plans  for  the  educa- 
tion of  adults  and  children  ;  they  enable  us  to  fulfil  the  notion, 
which  statesmen  have  entertained,  that  the  Church  is  to  be  the 
supporter  of  the  existing  orders,  by  making  her  a  teacher  and  ex- 
ample to  those  orders  respecting  their  duties  and  responsibilities  ; 
by  removing  the  hatred  which  their  forgetfulness  of  those  duties 
and  responsibilities  is  threatening  to  create  in  the  minds  of  the  lower 
classes. 

3.  But  a  Churchman,  such  as  I  have  supposed,  would  be  both 
compelled  by  his  circumstances,  and  urged  by  his  principles,  to 
change  these  convictions  into  action,  by  enlisting  all  the  wealthier 
inhabitants  of  his  parish  in  different  services  and  occupations  for 
the  benefit  of  their  inferiors.    I  am  unwilling  to  enlarge  upon  this 


560 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


subject ;  first,  because  my  practical  ignorance  makes  me  unfit  to 
offer  any  suggestions  upon  it;  and,  secondly,  because  I  am  certain 
that  our  English  political  wisdom,  guided  by  Catholic  feeling,  is 
already  doing  much  in  many  parts  of  this  land,  in  the  accomplish- 
ment of  such  a  design.  I  must,  however,  refer  to  it  for  the  purpose 
of  remarking,  how  the  notion,  that  party  organization  is  necessary, 
is  at  once  explained  and  refuted  the  moment  we  aim  at  an  ecclesi- 
astical organization.  It  is  explained  when  the  truth,  that  no  man 
is  meant  to  work  alone,  which  is  the  truth  that  is  implied  in  this 
strange  maxim,  is  made  the  principle  of  our  action.  It  is  refuted, 
for  we  find  how  infinitely  freer  from  friction  a  society  is  which  is 
held  together  by  sacramental  bonds,  and  is  moving  under  the  direc- 
tion of  an  appointed  pastor,  than  all  societies  constructed  upon  a 
party  model,  or  acknowledging  a  party  motive,  ever  have  been  or 
ever  can  be.  For  the  one  seeks  to  preserve  all  existing  ranks  and 
relations,  the  other  sets  them  all  aside.  The  one  is  continually  en- 
deavouring to  understand  how  the  middle  classes  may  be  brought 
most  to  act  upon  the  lower,  so  as  to  be  their  guides  and  not  their 
tyrants ;  how  the  upper  classes  may  be  brought  to  act  upon  the 
middle,  so  as  not  to  be  their  fawning  slaves,  and  at  the  same  time 
the  betrayers  of  their  consciences  at  elections — cold  and  distant, 
and  the  objects  of  their  servile  imitation  at  other  times ;  how  each 
portion  of  the  community  may  preserve  its  proper  position  to  the 
rest,  and  may  be  fused  together  by  the  spiritual  power  which  exists 
for  each,  the  minister  of  all,  the  creature  of  none.  The  other  con- 
founds all  orders,  and  yet  does  not  the  least  diminish  their  mutual 
repulsion,  or  make  them  feel  that  they  have  a  common  object. 
Above  all,  the  Churchman  is  ever  longing  to  discover  how  the  hand- 
maidens of  the  Church  may  be  brought  to  do  her  the  services  which 
they  alone  can  do,  without  departing  for  a  moment  from  their  own 
true  estate,  as  wives,  as  sisters,  as  mothers  ;  how  the  whole  sex  may 
be  an  order  of  Sisters  of  Charity ;  and  how,  in  each  particular 
neighbourhood,  this  order  may  be  at  work  in  lowliness  and  meek- 
ness, softening  and  healing  the  sorrows  of  the  world.  The  partisan 
acknowledges  no  difference  of  vocation  in  man  and  woman ;  all 
are  to  be  equally  feverish  and  restless;  careful  about  many  things, 
unfit  alike  for  quiet  contemplation  or  regular  activity. 

4.  Again,  let  us  suppose  our  Churchman  in  Ireland,  amidst  a 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


561 


population,  the  majority  of  which  acknowledge  no  relation  to  the 
body  of  which  he  is  a  member ;  how  would  he  feel,  and  how  would 
he  desire  to  act  ?  Would  he  not  think  thus  within  himself ;  "  When 
Anselm  came  over  from  his  Norman  convent  to  be  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury,  and  his  victorious  countrymen  thought  that  he  of  course 
would  look  upon  the  old  Saxons  of  the  soil,  as  they  did  ;  he  told 
the:n  plainly,  that  a  Churchman  acknowledged  no  distinctions  of 
race,  and  that  his  vocation  was  to  be  the  friend  of  the  poor  and 
distressed  wherever  he  met  with  them.  And  these  principles,  of 
course  with  great  exceptions  and  deviations,  were  acted  upon  by  a 
large  portion  of  the  Norman  bishops  and  clergy.  What  was  the 
effect  1  We  grew  up  to  be  an  English  nation.  The  Saxon  serf 
felt,  that  he  had  a  portion  and  a  right  in  the  soil ;  he  recollected 
the  sounds  of  his  native  language;  he  began  to  speak  it ;  in  due 
time  the  conquerors  and  the  conquered  became  one.  If  our  Church- 
men had  but  acted  upon  this  principle  in  Ireland ;  if  they  had  but 
said  to  the  English  settlers, — We  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  your 
Orange  lodges  and  your  hell-fire  clubs,  except  to  discipline  and  re- 
strain those  who  belong  to  them ;  we  are  come  over  as  protectors 
of  these  Celts;  we  are  to  raise  them  out  of  barbarism;  to  speak  to 
their  Church  feelings  and  their  national  feelings ;  to  call  forth  both 
together : — if  these  had  been  our  maxims,  how  many  problems, 
which  perplex  the  statesman  at  this  day,  might  have  been  solved 
long  ago !  But  that  phrase,  '  The  English  interest?  was  continu- 
ally present  to  the  minds  of  the  statesmen  who  sent  out  our  Bishops, 
and  though  they  might  often  stumble  by  mistake  upon  a  noble  rebel 
to  their  commands,  they  sought  diligently  for  men  who  should  for- 
ward their  own  narrow  policy.  What  has  been  the  consequence? 
The  national  feeling  in  Ireland  has  strangely  and  unnaturally  asso- 
ciated itself  with  that  Romanism  which  is  the  foe  of  all  national 
feeling.  The  Irish  look  upon  our  Church  as  a  Saxon  Church,  and 
they  actually  fly  to  Rome  to  give  them  an  Irish  Church.  But  even 
now  at  the  eleventh  hour,  if  better  and  truer  feelings  of  our  position 
are  rising  in  the  minds  of  statesmen,  may  not  the  Church  be  the 
means  of  carrying  them  out  ?  We  have  tried  what  the  mere 
preaching  of  Protestantism  will  do  in  Ireland,  and  so  far  as  it  has 
been  earnest  and  sincere,  it  has  not  been  in  vain.  But  still  it  has 
not  touched  the  hearts  of  Irishmen  ;  there  has  been  a  resistance  to 


562  THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 

it,  not  merely  in  their  bad  feelings  but  in  their  good.  State  libe- 
rality has  been  tried.  So  far  as  it  has  been  the  token  of  kindness 
and  sympathy,  perhaps  this  too  has  not  been  in  vain.  Still  all 
must  acknowledge  that  it  has  done  very  little ;  most  men  think  that 
a  fair  proportion  of  evil  has  been  mingled  with  the  good.  But  if 
there  be  a  sympathy  between  the  Catholic  and  National  principle, 
if  they  cannot  really  exist  apart,  why  may  we  not  begin  to  speak 
to  the  national  sympathies  of  Irishmen;  to  speak  to  them  as  mem- 
bers of  an  Irish  Catholic  Church ;  to  declare  that  every  Irishman 
ought  to  look  upon  himself  as  a  member  of  such  a  Church,  and 
not  of  any  other  Church,  Saxon  or  Romish ;  to  make  it  manifest 
by  acts,  that  we  hold  our  revenues  for  the  good  of  the  whole  land, 
and  that  it  would  not  gain  any  thing  but  misery  by  the  confiscation 
of  them,  or  by  the  extirpation  of  those  who  possessed  them  V9 
Such  thoughts,  I  say,  are  likely  to  arise  in  the  mind  of  an  Irish 
Churchman,  who  enters  into  the  principles  I  have  endeavoured  to 
develope.  They  may  be  very  crude,  but  still  they  may  be  the 
germs  of  acts  which  neither  the  State  nor  the  Church  will  have 
reason  to  complain  of. 

5.  To  one  who  feels  the  importance  of  the  Protestant  principle, 
and  that  its  true  home  is  in  the  Catholic  Church,  it  must  needs 
seem  a  strange  providence  in  respect  to  England,  that  she  should 
have  on  one  side  of  her  a  nation  in  which  Protestantism  has  tried 
to  exist  nakedly  and  exclusively ;  on  the  other  side,  a  nation  which 
wishes  to  be  Catholic  by  being  Romanist.  Each  experiment  is, 
I  think,  very  decisive,  but  each  is  connected  with  sins  which  we 
have  need  to  confess  and  deplore.  The  utter  insufficiency  of  Pres- 
byterianism  to  support  a  national  life  has  been  surely  proved  by  the 
example  of  Scotland.  But  we  began  with  setting  up  our  episco- 
pacy as  if  it  were  an  English  thing.  We  gave  the  Scotch  people 
the  notion,  that  their  own  kings  were  coming  back  to  reduce  them 
into  an  ecclesiastical  province  of  England,  and  the  religious  as 
w?ell  as  the  national  spirit,  rose  against  such  a  pretension.  Now, 
it  would  seem  as  if  the  episcopalian  body  in  Scotland  had  the  op- 
portunity of  showing,  that  they  are  neither  members  of  a  religious 
sect  nor  tools  of  England.  They  have  existed  for  many  years 
without  any  state  patronage ;  their  chief  fault  has  been,  that  they 
have  not  sympathized  with  the  feelings  of  the  people,  that  they 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS, 


563 


have  stood  too  much  upon  their  ecclesiastical  dignity,  that  they 
have  seemed  too  much  mere  anti-presbyterians.  But  if,  in  the  pre- 
sent crisis  of  Scotland,  they  will  consider  earnestly,  that  they  exist 
as  witnesses,  not  of  a  system  but  of  a  Church,  not  of  certain  notions 
about  episcopacy,  but  of  episcopacy  as  part  of  the  constitution  of 
Christ's  spiritual  kingdom  ;  they  will  find,  I  think,  that  they  may 
exercise  a  quiet  and  soothing  influence  over  that  ferment  of  Scotch 
feelings,  which  all  state  contrivances  have  been  so  utterly  ineffec- 
tual to  allay.  They  will  not,  I  hope,  look  with  proud  aristocratical 
contempt  upon  the  earnest  cry  which  the  people  have  sent  forth  to 
be  freed  from  civil  dominion.  They  will  not,  I  hope,  indulge  in 
mocking  allusions  to  the  proud  language  in  which  Presbyterianism 
used  to  assert,  that  it  was  free  of  this  control.  They  will  acknow- 
ledge that  spiritual  freedom  is  most  essential  to  the  life  of  a  nation. 
They  will  labour  to  show,  that  the  Church,  rightly  and  truly  con- 
stituted, is  able  to  humble  the  lofty  and  to  exalt  the  lowly ;  that 
the  tyranny  which  Presbyterianism  granted  to  its  aristocracy  at 
the  time  of  the  Reformation,  is  the  tyranny  against  which  its  sons 
are  groaning  now ;  that  its  boast  of  being  a  Church  for  the  poor 
has  ended  in  a  sadder  separation  between  the  poor  and  the  rich 
than  has  almost  ever  existed  in  any  country.  Here  again  I  am 
suggesting  no  projects  or  plans  to  Scotch  Churchmen.  I  am  merely 
urging  them  to  consider  seriously  the  indications  of  God's  will, 
and  to  desire  that  they  may  act  in  accordance  with  it. 

6.  The  lessons  which  we  have  derived  from  the  history  of  our 
connexion  with  Scotland  and  Ireland  (I  have  spoken  before  of 
those  which  are  suggested  by  the  circumstances  of  our  old  colonies 
in  North  America)  cannot  surely  be  lost  upon  us,  when  we  go 
forth  to  plant  new  settlements  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe,  or 
when  we  are  inquiring  how  we  are  to  deal  with  those  which  we 
possess  already.  Every  circumstance  of  their  position  and  of  ours 
seems  to  say,  '  See  that  you  do  not  merely  establish  an  English 
kingdom  in  those  soils ;  if  you  do,  that  kingdom  will  not  be  a  bless- 
ing to  the  colonists,  to  the  natives,  or  to  the  mother  country.  See 
that  you  do  not  merely  send  forth  preachers  in  your  ships  to  tell  the 
people  that  all  they  have  believed  hitherto — if  they  have  believed 
any  thing — is  false,  and  that  we  hold  a  doctrine  which  sets  it  all 
aside.    See  that  you  raise  up  in  the  midst  of  them  what  they  shall 


564 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


feel  to  be  as  real  a  kingdom  as  the  one  which  is  presented  to  them 
in  the  persons  of  governors  and  judges ;  a  kingdom  which  does  not 
only  deal  equal  justice  to  natives  and  to  settlers,  but  which  claims 
both  alike  for  its  citizens,  endues  both  alike  with  its  highest  privi- 
leges; a  kingdom  which  comes  to  subvert  nothing,  but  to  restore 
that  which  is  decayed  and  fallen  ;  to  adopt  into  itself  every  frag- 
ment of  existing  faith  and  feeling  ;  to  purify  it  and  exalt  it ;  to  cut 
off  from  it  only  that  which  the  conscience  of  the  native  confesses  to 
be  inconsistent  with  it ;  to  testify  that  wherever  there  is  a  creature 
having  human  limbs  and  features,  there  is  one  of  that  race  for 
which  Christ  died,  one  whom  he  is  not  ashamed  to  call  a  brother. 

In  such  countries  as  New  Zealand  and  Australia,  such  a  testi- 
mony as  is  borne  by  the  establishment  of  a  Christian  kingdom  of 
peace  and  righteousness  is  every  thing  ;  for  there,  of  course,  only 
the  rudest  and  most  incoherent  spiritual  theories  and  speculations 
will  be  found  to  exist.  In  India  the  case  is  altogether  different ;  yet 
there  more  than  anywhere  is  it  needful  that  the  signs  of  a  spi- 
ritual kingdom  should  be  introduced,  that  Christianity  should  be 
regarded  as  something  more  than  a  fine  theory.  For  how  did  the 
simple  tenets  of  Mahomedanism  prevail  over  the  complicated  creeds 
and  philosophies  of  the  Hindoos,  but  because  the  former  came  forth 
in  the  shape  of  an  organic  society,  and  the  latter  were  only  forms 
of  thought  connected  principally  with  the  physical  universe  ?  The 
Christian  Church  ought  to  understand  the  positions  both  of  the 
Hindoo  and  the  Mussulman,  in  respect  to  the  strange  masses  of 
feelings  and  opinions  which  are  exhibited  in  the  traditions  of  the 
one,  and  to  the  struggle  after  consistency  and  unity  which  are  visi- 
ble in  the  actual  history  of  the  other.  Would  that  the  supporters 
of  Indian  missions  had  taken  this  ground  when  they  were  assailed 
by  the  cowardice  and  indifference  of  the  merchant-emperors  thirty 
years  ago!  Would  that  they  had  been  able  to  reply  to  those  who 
had  accused  them  of  disturbing  the  faith  of  the  natives,  and  so  en- 
dangering English  dominion- — JYb  ;  it  is  your  godlessness  and  ra- 
pacity which  endanger  their  faith  ;  you  are  making  them  infidels 
while  you  pretend  to  indulge  their  superstitions  ;  we  go  to  save  their 
faith  by  delivering  them  from  their  superstitions  and  your  exam- 
ple ;  wcgo,  that  England  may  not  perish  in  that  day  when  she  shall 
be  called  to  give  account  of  the  crimes  which  you  have  committed. 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


565 


But  it  was  not  fully  understood  at  that  time  that  Christianity  was 
any  thing  else  but  a  sect,  or  a  collection  of  sects,  sent  into  the  world 
to  displace  Pagan  and  Mahomedan  sects ;  therefore  the  years  which 
have  followed  have  produced  their  natural  effect,  and  we  have  now 
to  deal  for  the  most  part  with  a  generation  of  open  or  disguised  in- 
fidels. Still  the  good  men  of  that  day,  guided  by  a  higher  wisdom 
than  their  own,  were  led  to  ask  strenuously  of  the  English  legisla- 
ture, that  a  Bishop  might  be  sent  out  to  them.  They  felt  that  they 
wanted  a  Church.  A  heart  was  put  into  a  country  which  had 
hitherto  only  been  directed  by  wise  heads  or  skilful  hands  ;  a  heart 
which  is  still  beating,  and  which  we  trust  may  yet  send  a  life-blood 
into  every  part  of  that  vast  empire.  The  issue  is  with  God,  but 
he  has  taught  us  by  sufficiently  manifest  indications  in  what  way 
He  wills  that  we  should  fulfil  our  part  in  the  work. 

7.  I  have  not  yet  spoken  of  the  spirit  in  which  we  should  act 
towards  the  members  of  foreign  Churches,  be  they  Romish  or  Pro- 
testant. But  enough  has  been  said  in  former  parts  of  this  work 
to  indicate  the  course  which  an  Englishman,  who  is  not  tied  down 
by  systems,  must  strive  to  pursue,  in  reference  to  them.  What  I 
have  been  chiefly  wishing  to  show  is,  that  here  we  have  the  means 
of  acting  upon  the  principles  which  all  men  everywhere  ought  to 
act  upon  if  they  could  ;  herein  it  seems  to  me  lies  the  blessing,  for 
which  we  have  to  give  thanks.  Our  Church  has  no  right  to  call 
herself  better  than  other  Churches  in  any  respect,  in  many  she  must 
acknowledge  herself  to  be  worse.  But  our  position,  we  may  fairly 
affirm,  for  it  is  not  a  boast  but  a  confession,  is  one  of  singular  ad- 
vantage. If  what  I  have  said  be  true,  our  faith  is  not  formed  by  a 
union  of  the  Protestant  systems  with  the  Romish  system,  nor  of 
certain  elements  taken  from  the  one  and  of  certain  elements 
taken  from  the  other.  So  far  as  it  is  represented  in  our  liturgy 
and  our  articles,  it  is  the  faith  of  a  Church,  and  has  nothing 
to  do  with  any  system  at  all.  That  peculiar  character  which 
God  has  given  us,  enables  us,  if  we  do  not  slight  the  mercy, 
to  understand  the  difference  between  a  Church  and  a  System,  bet- 
ter perhaps  than  any  of  our  neighbours  can,  and,  therefore,  our  po- 
sition, rightly  used,  gives  us  a  power  of  assisting  them  in  realizing 
the  blessings  of  their  own.  By  refusing  to  unite  with  them  on  the 
ground  of  any  of  their  systems,  by  seeking  to  unite  with  them 


566 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


on  the  grounds  of  the  universal  Church,  we  teach  them  wherein 
lies  their  strength  and  their  weakness  ;  by  determining  that  we  will 
be  a  nation  distinct  from  all  others,  we  encourage  each  of  them  to 
be  a  nation  distinct  from  us  and  from  all  others.  By  showing  them 
how  our  Church  life  and  our  national  life  are  interwoven  ;  we 
teach  them,  that  the  bonds  which  make  them  one  with  us  are  ne- 
cessary to  the  support  of  that  peculiar  character  and  position  which 
make  them  independent  of  us. 


But  for  such  tasks  as  these — for  reconciling  the  different  sects 
in  our  own  land,  for  dealing  with  the  wild  feelings  respecting  gov- 
ernment and  society  which  are  abroad,  for  bringing  the  different 
classes  into  co-operation,  for  entering  into  the  strong  passions  of 
Scotch  Calvinists  and  Irish  Romanists,  for  taming  the  savages  of 
the  antipodes,  for  restoring  the  strange  reliques  of  ancient  civiliza- 
tion among  the  natives  of  British  India,  for  suggesting  any  practi- 
cal hints,  or  giving  any  practical  help  to  our  brethren  on  the  con- 
tinent ;  what  need  have  we  of  another  discipline  and  another  spirit 
than  that  which  we  seem  at  present  to  possess  ?  Shall  wre  obtain 
either  the  one  or  the  other  by  sitting  still,  by  affirming  that  these 
tasks  are  too  great  for  creatures  so  infirm  and  fallen,  by  waiting  for 
some  sudden  inspiration  ?  This  cannot  be.  These  works  are  set 
before  us;  in  one  way  or  other,  we  are  trying  to  carry  them  on, 
and  must  carry  them  on.  The  necessity  is  laid  upon  us  ;  the  only 
point  to  be  considered  is  how  wTe  can  support  it.  Do  we  tremble 
at  the  great  efforts  of  thought  which  are  presupposed  in  these  out- 
ward undertakings,  the  careful  studies  in  history,  ecclesiastical,  and 
civil,  the  acquaintance  with  the  powers  and  the  distinctions  of 
words  as  the  signs  of  thought,  the  intimacy  with  the  symbols  which 
nature  and  art  have  furnished  to  the  mythologist,  the  patient  toil 
with  which  these  must  be  weighed  in  our  minds  before  we  can  cast 

o 

ourselves  into  the  feelings  of  other  men,  while  yet  we  do  not  lose 
our  own  ?  Assuredly  this  is  required  of  us— not  the  whole  of  each 
student — for  the  Church  is  one  body,  and  hath  many  members — 
but  something  of  every  one,  and  the  habit  and  disposition  of  all . 
But  there  is  nothing  in  all  this  to  stagger  the  countrymen  of  Bacon 
and  of  Newton.    Study  is  painful  and  intolerable  to  Englishmen 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


567 


if  they  cannot  connect  it  with  action.  They  cannot  pursue  it  for 
its  pleasure  or  its  comeliness ;  make  them  feel  that  there  is  an  end 
in  it,  that  it  is  necessary  for  their  business,  and  they  will  be  as  dil- 
igent slaves  in  the  reading  of  books  as  in  the  making  of  roads. 
Our  systems  and  our  parties  have  confused  us  in  every  direction  ; 
they  lead  us  to  fancy  that  all  things  are  moving  round  in  a  weary 
circle,  or  are  imprisoned  in  lifeless  notions.  At  the  same  time  they 
tempt  every  man  to  suppose  that  he  is  to  be  every  thing,  and  to 
know  every  thing,  and  to  do  every  thing,  for  he  feels  that  if  he 
has  not  the  whole  of  his  system  before  him,  each  part  of  it  becomes 
mischievous  and  false.  And  he  cannot  trust  other  men  to  do  their 
work  while  he  does  his  own,  for  he  feels  that  he  belongs  to  a  party 
rather  than  to  a  Church,  and  therefore  he  has  no  security  that  each 
person  has  his  order  and  duties  assigned  to  him.  Thus  we  are  at 
the  same  time  indolent  and  over-diligent,  ignorant  and  encyclo- 
paedic. Once  break  this  spell,  and  we  shall  again  begin  to  con- 
nect our  specific  studies  with  a  general  humanity,  and  so  at  once 
preserve  their  limitations  and  make  them  universal. 

But  there  is  another  and  the  more  serious  subject.  I  have 
spoken  of  a  different  discipline,  but  we  need  a  different  spirit  in 
order  to  that  discipline.  Not  a  different  Spirit  from  that  which  we 
received  in  our  baptism,  but  an  altogether  different  one  from  the 
spirit  of  party  and  of  selfishness,  which  we  have  allowed  to  enter 
into  us  and  possess  us  in  our  manhood.  To  exorcise  this,  that  the 
other  may  really  inform  us  and  rule  us,  should  surely  be  our  first 
object.  And  we  cannot  drive  it  out  of  others  until  we  have  striven 
that  it  may  be  banished  from  ourselves."  If  we,  who  form  the  cler- 
gy of  the  land,  believe  that  we  are  its  heart,  we  must  suppose  that 
the  purification  of  the  body  generally  depends  upon  our  purifica- 
tion ;  we  must  feel  that  every  evil  which  we  call  upon  others  to  re- 
pent of  has  its  origin  and  root  in  us,  and  that  we  must  repent  of  it 
first.  I  fear  that  the  habit  of  apologizing  for  our  institution,  when 
it  has  been  ignorantly  attacked  by  those  who  know  nothing  of  its 
meaning  or  its  blessing,  may  have  operated  injuriously  upon  our 
lives.  We  have  defended  the  arrangements  of  Providence  and  the 
order  of  the  Church,  till,  unawares,  we  have  begun  to  defend  our- 
selves, who  have  so  grievously  sinned  against  those  arrangements 


568 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


and  that  order,  and  have  hindered  men  from  perceiving  what  they 
are.  For  this  fault,  if  we  haveVommitted  it,  we  must  wish  to  make 
amends ;  since  we  must  know  that  there  can  be  no  national  con- 
fession or  national  reformation,  if  we,  who  ought  to  be  the  foremost 
in  both,  as  having  the  most  to  answer  for,  are  trying  to  make  ex- 
cuses for  ourselves,  hiding  the  evil  which  we  are  inwardly  con- 
scious of,  or  imputing  it  to  circumstances,  most  of  which  are  very 
favourable  to  us,  none  of  which  ought  to  be  our  masters. 

But  if  shame  and  humiliation  are  needful  for  English  clergy- 
men generally,  they  must  be  especially  needful  in  those  who  have 
presumed  to  speak  of  our  sins,  and  to  offer  any  suggestions  for  our 
amendment.  It  is  too  probable  that  they  would  have  known 
nothing  of  the  evil  of  systems  and  parties  in  others  if  they  had 
not  felt  it  in  themselves ;  nay,  that  the  irritation  of  the  beam  in 
their  own  eye  has  made  them  more  eager  to  detect  the  mote  in 
their  brother's  eye.  I  have  in  this  book  attacked  no  wrong  ten- 
dency to  which  I  do  not  know  myself  to  be  liable.  I  hope  I  am 
conscious  to  a  certain  degree,  though  very  insufficiently,  of  the  dan- 
ger I  am  in  of  substituting  the  denunciation  of  it  for  the  practical 
correction  of  it  in  the  only  sphere  over  which  I  have  any  control. 
I  am  not  ignorant,  also,  that  the  hints  which  I  have  offered  in  op- 
position to  systems  may,  themselves,  be  turned  by  myself  or  by 
others  into  a  system  ;  and  that  neither  its  weakness  and  inconsisten- 
cy, nor  the  insignificance  of  its  originator,  may  prevent  it  from  con- 
necting itself  with  some  new  party.  I  believe  that  some  of  whom 
I  have  spoken  in  this  chapter  began  to  fulfil  their  mission  with  as 
sincere  a  desire  that  their  words  might  never  become  the  symbols 
of  a  faction  as  I  can  feel  now.  I  do  not,  therefore,  confide  in  my- 
self. But  since  a  school,  which  should  be  formed  to  oppose  all 
schools,  must  be  of  necessity  more  mischievous  than  any  of  them  ; 
and  since  a  school,  which  pretended  to  amalgamate  the  doctrines 
of  all  other  schools,  would  be,  as  I  think,  more  mischievous  than  that. 
I  do  pray  earnestly,  that  if  any  such  schools  should  arise,  they  may 
come  to  nought ;  and  that  if  what  I  have  written  in  this  book  should 
tend  even  in  the  least  degree  to  favour  the  establishment  of  them,  it 
may  come  to  nought.  On  the  other  hand,  if  there  be  any  thing 
here  which  may  help  to  raise  men  above  their  own  narrow  concep- 


THE  ENGLISH  SYSTEMS. 


569 


tions  and  mine,  may  lead  them  to  believe  that  there  is  a  way  to  that 
truth  which  is  living  and  universal,  and  above  us  all,  and  that  He 
who  is  Truth  will  guide  them  along  in  that  way — this  which  is 
from  Him  and  not  from  me,  I  pray  that  He  will  bless.  1  Let  all 
thine  enemies  perish,  0  Lord all  systems,  schools,  parties  which 
have  hindered  men  from  seeing  thpe  largeness,  and  freedom,  and 
glory  of  thy  kingdom ;  '  but  let  them  that  love  thee,'  in  whatever 
earthly  mists  they  may  at  present  be  involved, 1  be  as  the  sun  when 
he  goeth  forth  in  his  strength/ 


NOTES. 


[A.] 

In  the  text  the  Quaker  expresses  his  belief  u  that  the  catechumens  in 
the  primitive  Church  were  not  taught  something  wholly  different  in  kind 
from  that  which  they  learnt  after  their  baptism,"  that  "  they  were  not 
reasoned  with  upon  those  selfish  motives  which  it  must  have  been  the 
object  of  their  after  initiation,  to  cure  them  of."  It  is  probable  that  many 
passages  may  be  produced  from  the  fathers,  to  refute  this  opinion ;  to 
show  that  they  did  sometimes  resort  to  selfish  arguments,  upon  the  plea 
that  pure  things  are  meant  for  the  pure.  Such  a  practice  is  so  very  plausi- 
ble, so  very  flattering  to  our  spiritual  pride,  and  therefore  has  prevailed 
so  much  in  all  later  ages  of  the  Church,  that  one  must  expect  to  find  the 
seeds  of  it  in  the  earliest.  From  the  excellent  principle,  that  milk  is  for 
babes  and  meat  for  grown  men,  an  economist  might  easily  pass  to  the 
notion  that  there  are  some  constitutions  which  are  not  even  fit  for  milk, 
and  that  to  these  some  liquid  drawn  from  the  muddy  streams  of  the 
world,  or  distilled  from  its  poisonous  herbs,  may  be  fitly  administered. 
But  that  this  was  not  the  habitual  and  deliberate  opinion  of  these  ages, 
may,  I  think,  be  very  clearly  inferred  from  the  short  treatise  of  Augustine, 
"De  Catechizandis  rudibus."*  This  valuable  book  was  addressed  to  a 
Carthagenian  deacon,  who  had  complained  of  the  difficulty  which  he 
found  in  preserving  the  cheerfulness  and  freedom  of  his  own  mind,  while 
he  was  engaged  in  catechising.  The  remarks  which  St.  Augustine 
makes  upon  this  subject  well  deserve  the  attention  of  all  teachers,  whe- 
ther in  the  pulpit  or  the  school-room.  It  is  not,  however,  for  their  sake, 
that  I  refer  to  this  little  work,  but  that  the  reader  may  see  in  what  spirit 
a  Bishop  of  the  fourth  century  would  have  addressed  a  young  heathen, 
who  was  only  preparing  for  admission  into  the  Church. 

Having  stated  his  views  respecting  the  method  in  which  the  historical 
parts  of  Scripture  should  be  exhibited  to  the  candidate,  and  how  the  com- 
ing of  Christ  should  be  shown  to  be  the  end  to  which  they  are  all  point- 
ing, he  goes  on  to  say,  "  Q,uas  autem  major  causa  est  adventus  Domini, 
nisi  ut  ostenderet  Deus  dilectionem  suam  in  nobis,  commendans  earn 
vehementer;  quia  citm  adhuc  inimici  essemus,  Christus  pro  nobis  mor- 
tuns  est?    Hoc  autem  ideo,  quia  finis  praecepti  et  plenitudo  legis,  caritas 


*  St.  Aug.  Op.  torn.  vi.  p.  191.  ed.  Benedict. 


572 


NOTES. 


est:  ut  et  nos  invicem  diligamus,  et  quemadmodum  ille  pro  nobis  animam 
luam  posuit,  sic  et  nos  pro  fratribus  animam  ponamus;  et  ipsum  Deum, 
quoniam  prior  dilexit  nos,  et  Filio  suo  unico  non  pepercit,  sed  pro  nobis 
omnibus  tradidit  eum,  si  amare  pigebat,  saltern  nunc  redarnare  non  pigeat. 
Nulla  est  enim  major  ad  amorem  invitatio,  quam  praevenire  amando  ;  et 
nimis  durus  est  animus,  qui  dilectionem  si  nolebat  impendere,  nolit  re- 
pendere.  Q,u6d  si  in  ipsis  flagitiosis  et  sordidis  amoribus  videmus,  nihil 
aliud  eos  agere  qui  amari  vicissim  volunt,  nisi  ut  documentis  quibus  va- 
lent  aperiant  et  ostendant  quantum  ament,  eamque  imaginem  justitise 
praetendere  anectant,  ut  vicem  sibi  reddi  quodam  modo  flagitent  ab  eis 
animis,  quos  illecebrare  moliuntur;  ipsique  ardentius  aestuant,  cum  jam 
moveri  eodem  igne  etiam  illas  mentes  quas  appetunt  sentiunt :  si  ergo  et 
animus  qui  torpebat,  cum  se  amari  senserit  excitatur,  et  qui  jam  fervebat 
cum  se  redamari  didicerit,  magis  accenditur  :  manifestum  est  nullam  esse 
majorem  causam  qua  vel  inchoetur  vel  augeatur  amor,  quam  cum  amari 
se  cognoscit,  qui  nondum  amat  aut  redamari  se  vel  posse  sperat,  vel  jam 
probat  qui  prior  amat.  Et  si  hoc  etiam  in  turpibus  amoribus,  quanto 
plus  in  amicitia'?  Quid  enim  aliud  cavemus  in  offensione  amicitiae,  nisi 
ne  amicus  arbitretur  quod  eum  vel  non  diligimus,  vel  minus  diligimus 
quam  ipse  nos  diligit  ?  Quod  si  crediderit,  frigidior  erit  in  eo  amore 
uo  invicem  homines  mutua  familiaritate  perfruuntur :  et  si  non  ita  estr 
infirmus  ut  haec  ilium  ofFensio  faciat  ab  omni  dilectione  frigescere  ;  in  ea 
se  tenet  qua  non  ut  fruatur,  sed  ut  consulat  diligit.  Operae  pretium  est 
autem  animadvertere,  quo  modo,  quamquam  et  superiores  velint  se  ab 
inferioribus  diligi,  eorumque  in  se  studioso  delectentur  obsequio,  et 
quanto  magis  id  senserint,  tanto  magis  eos  diligant,  tamen  quanto  amore 
exardescat  inferior,  cum  a  superiore  se  diligi  senserit.  Ibi  enim  gratior 
amor  est,  ubi  non  aestuat  indigentiae  siccitate,  sed  ubertate  beneficenlise 
profluit  Ille  namque  amor  ex  miseria  est,  iste  ex  misericordia.  Jam 
vero  si  etiam  se  amari  posse  a  superiore  desperabat  inferior,  ineffabiliter 
commovebitur  in  amorem,  si  ultro  ille  fuerit  dignatus  ostendere,  quantum 
diligat  eum  qui  nequaquam  sibi  tantum  bonum  promittere  auderet.  Q,uid 
autem  supenus  Deo  judicante,  et  quid  desperatius  homine  peccante  ?  qui 
se  tanto  magis  tuendum  et  subjugandum  superbis  potestatibus  addixerat, 
quae  beatificare  non  possunt,  quanto  magis  desperaverat  posse  sui  curam 
geri  ab  ea  potestate  quae  non  malitia  sublimis  esse  vult  sed  bonitate  sub- 
lines est. 

"  Si  ergo  maxime  propterea  Christus  advenit,  ut  cognosceret  homo 
quantum  eum  diligat  Deus;  et  ideo  cognosceret  ut  in  ejus  dilectionem  a 
quo  prior  dilectus  est  inardesceret,  proximumque  illo  jubente  et  demon- 
strante  diligeret,  qui  non  proximum,  sed  longe  peregrinantem  diligendo 
factus  est  proximus  ;  omnisque  Scriptura  divina  quae  ante  scripta  est  ad 
praenuntiandum  adventum  Domini  scripta  est ;  et  quidquid  postea  man- 
datum  est  litteris  et  divina  auctoritate  firmatum,  Christum  narrat,  et 
dilectionem  monet:  manifestum  est  non  tantum  totam  Legem  et  Pro- 


NOTES. 


573 


phetas  in  illis  duobus  pendere  praeceptis  dilectionis  Dei  et  proximi,  quae 
adhuc  sola  Scriptura  sancta  erat  cum  hoc  Dominus  diceret,  sed  etiam 
quaecumque  posterius  salubriter  conscripta  sunt  memoriaeque  mandata 
divinarum  volumina  literarum.  Gluapropter  in  veteri  Testamento  est 
occultatio  novi,  in  novo  Testamento  est  manifestatio  veteris.  Secundum 
illam  occultationem  carnaliter  intelligentes  carnales  et  tunc  et  nunc  pcE- 
nali  timore  subjugati  sunt.  Secundum  hanc  autem  manifestationem  spi- 
ritales,  et  tunc  quibus  pie  pulsantibus  etiam  occulta  patuerunt,  et  nunc 
qui  non  superbi  quaerunt,  ne  etiam  aperta  claudantur,  spiritaliter  intelli- 
gentes donata  caritate  liberati  sunt. 

"  Quia  ergo  caritati  nihil  adversius  quam  invidentia ;  mater  autem 
invidentiae  superbia  est ;  idem  Dominus  Jesus  Christus,  Deus  homo,  et 
divinae  in  nos  dilectionis  indicium  est,  et  humanae  apud  nos  humilitatis 
exemplum,  ut  magnus  tumor  noster  majore  contraria  medicina  sanaretur. 
Magna  est  enim  miseria  superbus  homo :  sed  major  misericordia,  humilis 
Deus.    Hac  ergo  dilectione  tibi  tam&uam  fine  PROPOSITO  QUO  RE- 

FERAS  OMNIA  QUJE  DICIS,  aUIDQUID  NARRAS  ITA  NARRA  UT  ILLE  CDI  LO- 
QUERIS  ACDIENDO  CREDAT,  CREDENDO  SPERET,  SPERANDO  AMET." 

These  last  words  are  tolerably  decisive  as  to  the  opinion  of  Augus- 
tine, respecting  the  manner  in  which  the  character  and  purpose  of  God, 
and  the  object  of  the  Gospel,  should  be  set  before  those  who  have  not 
yet  been  received  into  his  covenant.  In  this  point  of  view  his  remarks 
would  seem  to  me  chiefly  important  to  missionaries,  who  are  acting 
directly  upon  the  minds  and  consciences  of  heathens.  I  should  never 
have  dreamed  of  arguing  the  question  at  all  in  reference  to  those  who 
have  been  brought  up  in  a  Christian  country  ;  who  believe  that  they  are 
struggling  far  a  higher  idea  of  Christianity  than  that  which  prevails 
among  their  countrymen  generally,  whose  fathers  did  actually,  as  I  think, 
maintain  a  fundamental  Church  principle  which  was  in  great  hazard  of 
being  forgotten,  and  have  transmitted  to  their  descendants  at  least  the 
form  of  that  principle,  divested  I  allow,  to  a  great  degree,  of  its  strength  and 
vitality,  but  on  the  other  hand  hallowed  by  feelings  of  old  association  and 
reverence.  To  deal  with  such  men  as  if  they  stood  upon  the  same 
ground  with  heathens,  because  they  have  not  been  baptized,  seems  to  me 
a  wilful  denial  of  the  effects  which  God's  covenant  has  produced  upon  a 
society  which  it  has  encompassed  for  a  thousand  years,  under  pretence 
of  doing  honour  to  the  sign  of  that  covenant.  In  quoting  then  St.  Au- 
gustine, I  mean  merely  to  prove,  that  even  upon  this  hypothesis  we  are 
not  warranted  by  the  practice  of  antiquity,  in  treating  Quakers  as  if  they 
must  receive  baptism,  before  we  can  speak  with  them  respecting  the 
principles  and  end  of  the  Gospel.  Whoever  produces  the  maxim  ayia 
aytoiq  in  opposition  to  the  mode  of  reasoning  which  I  have  adopted  with 
the  Quaker,  is  not  attacking  me  but  St.  Augustine. 

Nor  will  he  make  his  case  better,  if  he  should  plead  that  the  heretic 
who  adopts  parts  of  the  Gospel  and  rejects  the  rest,  and  who  lives  under 

37 


574 


NOTES. 


the  shadow  of  the  Catholic  Church,  is  really  in  a  worse  condition  than 
the  heathen,  and  must  be  treated  as  one  who  has  sinfully  sacrificed  all 
his  powers  of  spiritual  apprehension,  and  can  only  be  appealed  to  by 
arguments  addressed  to  his  sensible  experience.  For  then  we  shall  pro- 
duce the  two  books  of  Augustine,  1  De  Moribus  Ecclesiae  Catholics  et 
de  Moribus  Manichaeorum  ;'*  books  written  for  the  express  purpose  of 
convincing  those  who  had  been  seduced,  by  what  St.  Augustine  knew 
from  his  own  experience  to  be  the  most  fatal  of  all  heresies.  I  allude  to 
this  work  the  rather,  because  there  are  many  passages  in  it,  which  might 
lead  one  to  suppose  that  he  would  in  this  particular  case  have  adopted 
the  maxim  against  which  I  am  contending.  For  instance,  in  one  place 
he  says,  speaking  of  the  manner  in  which  the  Manichaeans  treated  the 
Old  Testament,  u  Dicendum  est  vobis,  Non  est  vestrum  ista  intelligere. 
Non  parum  mihi  cogniti  estis.  Crassas  omnino  mentes  et  corporeorum 
simulacrorum  pestifero  pastu  morbidas  ad  divina  judicanda  defertis,  quae 
multo  altiora  sunt  quam  putatis."  And  again,  "  Poteram  pro  mea  medio- 
critate  discutere  singula,  et  eruere  ac  demonstrare  quae  accepi,  in  quorum 
excellentia  et  altitudine  plerumque  verba  deficiunt :  sed  quamdiu  latra- 
tis,  non  est  faciendum.  Non  enim  frustra  dictum  est  Nolite  sanctum  dare 
canibus.  Ne  succenseatis.  Et  ego  latravi  et  canis  fui,  quando  mecum 
jure  non  docendi  cibo,  sed  refellendi  fustibus  agebatur.  Si  autem  in  vo- 
bis esset  caritas,  de  qua  nunc  agitur,  vel  etiam  si  fuerit  aliquando,  quan- 
tam  cognoscendae  veritatis  magnitudo  desiderat,  aderit  Deus  qui  ostendat 
vobis  neque  apud  Manichaeos  esse  Christianam  fidem,  quae  ad  summum 
apicem  sapientiae  veritatisque  perducit,  qua  perfrui  nihil  est  aliud  nisi 
beate  vivere,  neque  esse  uspiam,  nisi  in  catholica  disciplina."  And  again, 
"  Unde  illud  exoritur,  quod  ab  initio  satagimus,  nihil  in  Ecclesia  catholica 
salubrius  fieri,  quam  ut  rationem  praecedat  auctoritas." 

From  these  passages  one  might  easily  infer  that  Augustine  would 
appeal  only  to  such  low  hopes  as  these  low  minds  could  reach,  would 
give  nothing  but  fieshless  bones  to  these  barking  dogs,  would  insist  upon 
their  submitting  to  the  authority  of  the  Church,  before  he  treated  them 
as  capable  of  hearing  any  reason.  How  stands  the  case  ?  He  declares 
at  the  outset  of  his  treatise  (c.  2),  that  he  wTill  appeal  only  to  those  scrip- 
tures which  they  themselves  recognise,  and  will  try  the  Church  by  those 
moral  signs  which  they  hold  to  be  sound  (c.  3) ;  that  though  according 
to  the  true  order  of  nature,  authority  ought  to  precede  reason,  he  should 
nevertheless  call  upon  them  to  receive  nothing,  for  which  he  did  not  pro- 
duce a  reason.  Adding  "  Delectat  enim  me  imitari  quantum  valeo  man- 
suetudinem  Domini  met  Jesu  Christi,  qui  etiam  ipsius  mortis  malo,  quo 
nos  exuere  vellet,  indutus  est."  And  to  what  kind  of  reasons  does  he  ap- 
peal 1  He  inquires  what  the  Summum  Bonum  is,  he  shows  what  an 
appetite  there  is  in  man  after  it,  he  proves  that  God  must  be  the  good, 
and  that  the  knowledge  and  love  of  God  must  be  the  eternal  life,  which 
•  August,  torn.  i.  p.  512.  ed.  Benedict. 


NOTES. 


575 


men  are  craving.  These  are  the  principles  from  which  he  starts,  and  to 
which  all  that  he  says  about  the  Scriptures,  and  the  Church,  is  referred. 
And  he  does  not  speak  of  these  matters  in  a  cold  dry  spirit,  as  if  he  were 
addressing  men  before  whom  he  was  afraid  of  exhibiting  any  deeper 
emotions ;  his  words  often  rise  almost  into  a  rapture,  though  he  never 
for  a  moment  loses  his  intellectual  clearness,  or  his  human  affection.* 

I  think  then  that  in  abandoning  the  argument  from  safety,  and  in 
appealing  to  the  principles  which  are  still  acknowledged  by  those  who 
have  wandered  the  farthest  from  what  I  believe  to  be  the  order  of  the 
Catholic  Church,  I  am  acting  in  the  spirit  of  these  passages.  The  other 
method  seems  to  me  to  be  formed  from  an  incongruous  combination  of 
the  hardest  maxims  and  precedents  of  the  early  times,  with  the  most  vul- 
gar of  our  own.  It  is  an  attempt  to  graft  Paley  upon  Chrysostom,  to 
establish  ancient  Christianity  by  the  help  of  the  Stock  Exchange. 


[B.] 

The  following  passage  from  Tittmann's  Meletemata  Sacra  (pp. 
27 — 29)  will  explain  the  allusion  in  the  text,  "  Nobis  quidem  inde  a  longo 
tempore  visa  est,  atque  etiamnum  videtur  maximas  veritatis  notas  habere 
sententia  ea,  quam  innuimus  loc.  cit  deinde  vero  dudum  prolatam  fuisse 
vidimus  a  Laur.  Valla,  Not.  in  N.  T.  cujus  verba  infra  scripsimus,t  et 
Beza,  Not.  ad  h.  1. ;  nostris  temporibus  autem  in  primis  exornatam  a  I. 
A.  Cramero,  Beytrage  zur  Beforderung  theol.  Gelehrsamkeit,  P.  i.  p. 
232,  et  Gabr.  Chr.  Beni.  Moschio,  Ecklar.  der  Evangel.  P.  i.  p.  289.  pro- 
batam  quoque  Jo.  Aug.  Ernesti,  Bibl.  Theol.  Nov.  T.  iii.  p.  129,  sqq. 
Scilicet,  ut  dicamus  breviter,  nec  repetamus,  quae  V.  T.  disputavimus  loco 
citato,  vocabulum  ).6yov  arbitramur  denotare  promissum,  usurpatumque 
esse  loco  rov  ).ty6fitvoq,  quod  plane  sequipollet  vocabulo  magis  usitato  ; 
6  ioxofitvoq,  ejusque  usurpandi  causam  repetitam  esse,  partim  ex  more 
illorum  temporum  in  cogitando  denominandoque  Servatore,  partim  ex 
usu  loquendi,  partim  a  consilio  Joannis  in  scribendo  hoc  libro,  partim 
denique  a  consuetudine  Domini  ipsius  in  se  describendo.  Primum  enim 
mos  illorum  temporum,  et  ex  ipsa  rei  natura,  quoniam  Servator  erat  turn 
futurus,  et  ex  consuetudine  V.  T.  receptus,  fuit  hie,  ut  Messias  diceretur 
6  iox6tutvos,  xzn  <lu0  quidem  nomine  in  T.  V.  appellatus  est  xar  i£oxy*> 
et  quemadmodum  Cyrillus  Hieros.j  innuit,  ex  loco  Gen.  xlix.  10,  in  N.  T. 
autem  eodem  nomine  insignitus  legitur  saepissime,  veluti  Matth.  xi.  3. 

•  See  especially  the  passages  between  the  eighteenth  and  twenty-sixth  chapters  of 
the  first  book, — a  noble  piece  of  Christian  Ethical  Philosophy. 

t  Sunt  autem  haec  :  o  Aoyoq  benedictum  illud  semen  declarat,  de  quo  Adamo,  Abra- 
hamo,  Isaaco,  Jacobo,  Davidi,  et  electis  omnibus,  locutus  est  Dominus,  quasi  sermonem, 
seu  Promissum,  Dei  voces. 

X  Catech.  xii.  p.  262  ed.  Prenot. 


576. 


NOTES. 


ubi  Joannes  Baptista  quseri  ex  eo  jussit,  ab  t2  o  io^itroq,  tj  ttsgor 
7TQoodo%o)fisv;  et  apud  ipsum  Joannem,  cap.  vi.  16.  xi.  27.  Unde  Judseis, 
in  primisque  Christianis,  neque  incognitum  plane  nomen  esse  po- 
tuit,  neque  insusitatum  in  consuetudine  vulgari.  Deinde  quod  koyov 
Evangelista  dixit  loco  vocis  Xfyo/uevoq,  id  quidem  offendet  neminem,  con- 
suetudinis  loquendi  Scripturarum  sacrarum  vel  leviter  peritum :  constat 
enim,  vocabula  abstractorum  pro  concretis  centies  adhiberi,  idque  non 
raro  factum  esse  alias  quoque  in  denominando  Domino  nostro ;  veluti 
quando  amtTjota  appellatur  loco  aonrjooq  cap.  iv.  22,  item  t,(orj  et  cpiaq,  aut 
apud  Lucam,  Ev.  ii.  25  et  30,  oonrjqtov  et  naodxlrjoiq  rov  'JcocrqA.  Nec 
dubitationem  habere  potest,  vocabulo  Xoyov  tribui  posse  earn  vim  quam 
diximus,  quoniam  vocabulum  Hebraicum  quod  Graeco  respondit,  Gra?- 
cumque  ipsum  Rom.  ix.  6,  sexcenties  in  locis  de  promissione  dictum  extat} 
atque  ab  interpretibus  Graecis  translatum  reperitur  ayyeUa  et  inayytXtoj 
veluti  Prov.  xii.  25,  atque  adeo  fayofievoq  idem  sit  et  esse  possit,  quod 
InayytXXofievoq.  Unde  etiam  in  loco  Sap.  xviii.  15,  Angelus  divinitus 
promissus  et  ablegatus  Xoyoq  Qiov  appellatur,  de  quo  vid.  Schleusneri 
Spicilegium  Lexici  in  interpr.  Gr.  V.  T.  Spec.  i.  p.  75.  Ac  plane  eandem 
vim  vocabulum  XoXov  obtinet  in  reliquis  libris,  Joannis  nimirum,  1  Ep.  i. 
1,  ubi  Dominus  appellatus  est  loyoq  rrq  id  est,  promissus  auctor  fe- 
licitatis  ;  et  Apoc.  xix.  13,  in  quo  loco  dicitur  Xoyoq  rov  6eov,  hoc  est,  a 
Deo  promissus.  Turn  porro  consilium  Joannis  in  scribendo  Evangelio, 
cum  fuerit  hoc,  ut  demonstraret,  quemadmodum  supra  vidimus,  Jesum 
esse  promissum  exspectatumque  Messiam ;  facile  quisque  videt  quam 
aptum  sit  ei  consilio,  quamque  accommodatum  vocabulum  rov  Xoyov,  nunc 
*  ipsum  promissum  Messiam  exprimens.  Ad  extremum,  quod  in  primis 
notabile  est,  Domini  ipsi  in  sermonibus  omnibus  in  hoc  libro  commemo- 
ratis,  solenne  fuit,  se  appellare  legatum  a  Patre,  Patrem  vero  mitlentem, 
seque  describere  tanquam  eum  qui  missus  a  Patj'e,  profectusque  in  has 
terras  venerit,  atque  ad  eundem  rediturus  sit ;  veluti  cap.  vi.  38,  xvi.  28, 
xiii.  3,  reliqua ;  quo  innuere  volebat  manifeste  se  esse  rov  in/ofiivov,  hoc 
est,  Messiam  promissum  exspectatumque.  Atque  hsec  consuetudo  Do- 
mini videtur  fuisse  causa  praecipua  usurpandi  hujus  vocabuli  alias  in  hac 
re  paulo  insolentioris.  Itaque  sensus  verborum  priorum,  est  hie :  pro- 
missus Servator  extitit  ante  rerum  omnium  initia,  tanquam  scriptum 
fuisset  hoc  modo,  iv  aoxrj  r\v  6  hyoptvoq  owttiq." 

These  remarks  would  be  comparatively  unimportant  if  they  merely 
expressed  the  opinions  of  an  individual  critic,  even  of  one  so  respectable 
as  Tittmann.  But  the  reader  will  perceive  that  he  is  able  to  produce  a 
fair  list  of  authorities  upon  his  side,  some  of  them  dating  as  far  back  as 
the  Reformation,  some  numbered  among  the  scholars  of  the  last  age.  All 
these,  with  more  or  less  reservation,  subscribed  to  an  interpretation,  which 
if  it  were  applied  to  any  passage  in  any  uninspired  author,  would  have  been 
rejected  by  every  one  of  them  with  indignation  and  disdain.  Now  there 
must  be  a  reason  for  this.    Men  who  have  studied  the  laws  of  language 


NOTES. 


could  not  talk  in  this  way  about  substituting  the  abstract  for  the  concrete, 
or  produce  such  utterly  inapplicable  parallels  from  other  parts  of 
Scripture,  and  then  resort  to  the  insolent  critical  dogmas,  that  '  no  one 
who  is  in  the  least  degree  acquainted  with  the  language  of  the  Bible  can 
be  offended'  by  such  a  departure  from  all  ordinary  principles  and 
usages,  if  there  were  not  some  deeply  rooted  habit  of  thought  and  feel- 
ing with  which  the  simple  mode  of  rendering  the  words  is  at  variance. 
What  this  is,  perhaps,  we  may  for  a  moment  be  puzzled  to  discover ; 
for  the  feelings  of  the  writers  near  the  time  of  the  Reformation  were,  in 
many  respects,  directly  opposed  to  those  of  their  successors  in  the  two 
following  centuries.  But  if  we  remember  the  great  eagerness  which 
there  was  among  the  writers  of  the  earlier  period,  to  assert  the  distinc- 
tion of  the  Bible  from  all  other  books,  and  above  all,  to  cut  it  off  from  any 
fellowship  with  philosophy,  we  need  not  wonder  that  they  should  have  de- 
sired wholly  to  separate  the  use  of  the  word  upon  which  the  Gospel  of  St. 
John  turns,  from  the  same  word  as  it  is  employed  by  Plato  and  by  Philo. 

The  early  Socinian  writers  perceived  the  fact,  which  the  orthodox 
Protestants  had  determined  to  overlook,  and  made  use  of  it  to  prove,  thai 
if  this  expression  imported  something  abstract  and  impersonal  in 
either  of  the  uninspired  writers,  it  must  have  the  same  import  in  the 
sacred  ones.  That  those  who  replied  to  them  should  take  fresh  pains  to 
assert  the  special  signification,  and  should  pronounce  the  effort  to  con- 
nect it  with  any  other  as  profane  and  heretical,  was  to  be  expected. 
Then  came  the  time  when  the  classical  writers  began  to  be  spoken  of 
with  respect ;  when  the  ordinary  Protestant  commentator  was  rather 
glad  to  look  upon  Scripture  as  containing  a  new  and  expanded  form  of 
heathen  morality,  and  when  the  descendants  of  the  Polish  Socinians  be- 
gan to  exercise  an  important  influence  on  theological  opinion.  In  such 
a  time,  one  might  have  looked  for  a  reversal  of  the  former  decrees, 
for  a  rather  excessive  willingness  to  find  out  an  analogy  between  St. 
John  and  the  Heathen  or  Jewish  teacher.  But  by  this  time  Platonism 
had  been  just  as  much  exhausted  of  its  meaning  as  Christianity.  So  far 
as  any  heathen  philosopher  was  found  to  have  laid  down  fine  maxims 
about  virtue,  he  was  respected  as  a  Christian,  minus  the  belief  in  Christ. 
But  when  he  uttered  any  thing  which  savoured  of  a  feeling  and  recog- 
nition of  mystery,  the  reverence  for  him  disappeared;  here  his  paganism 
or  false  philosophy  was  thought  to  have  obtruded  itself.  A  new  merit  was 
discovered  in  the  Gospel,  that  it  put  an  end  to  such  dreams,  and  brought 
every  thing  within  the  region  of  common  sense.  As  this  feeling  belonged 
both  to  the  believers  and  to  the  deniers  of  the  old  Creeds,  it  was  not  won- 
derful that  the  former  should  be  glad  of  any  expedient  for  proving  that 
St.  John,  though  he  asserted  a  strange  dogma,  was  perfectly  free  from 
all  taint  of  mysticism ;  and  that  the  latter  should  have  endeavoured  to 
evade  the  authority  of  his  words,  by  alleging  that  he  certainly  did  show 
symptoms  of  a  tendency  which  the  enlightened  of  all  parties  had  agreed 


578  NOTES. 

c 

to  denounce.  In  our  own  day,  the  evangelieal  protest  against  mere 
heathen  morality,  and  the  terror  of  the  new  attempts  to  exhibit  Chris- 
tianity as  only  one  out  of  many  forms  of  religious  faith  and  opinion,  have 
led  to  the  same  desire  for  an  exclusive  interpretation,  which  prevailed 
for  different  reasons  in  former  periods.  Tittmann's  interpretation,  there- 
fore, is  very  likely  to  be  a  popular  one  among  religious  people  both  here 
and  abroad. 

But  can  we  be  honouring  Scripture,  while  we  are  consciously  attempt- 
ing to  find  strange  and  tortuous  explanations  of  its  most  awful  and  char- 
acteristic passages  ?  Ought  not  every  theological  student  to  suspect 
himself,  if  he  feels  that  he  is  inclined  to  take  refuge  in  this  or  any  similar 
contrivance  for  evading  the  ordinary  force  of  words  ?  I  do  most  ear- 
nestly press  this  thought  upon  those  whom  it  may  most  concern,  because 
it  seems  to  me  that  the  recovery  of  a  sound  spiritual  theology  among  us 
depends  mainly  upon  the  temper  of  mind  in  which  we  apply  ourselves  to 
the  study  of  St.  John's  Gospel ;  upon  the  way  in  which  we  connect  it 
with  Old  Testament  history  and  prophecy,  and  upon  our  willingness  to 
acknowledge  that  it  does  interpret  to  us  the  history  of  God's  dealings 
with  men  in  all  time.  The  more  I  look  at  the  different  directions  which 
men's  thoughts  are  taking  in  this  day,  the  more  it  seems  to  me  that  this 
is  the  subject  to  which  we  ought  to  devote  ourselves ;  and  the  right 
meditation  upon  which  may  save  us  from  a  thousand  confusions,  and 
help  us  to  bring  the  most  apparently  opposite  feelings  into  reconciliation. 

The  three  following  notes  may  perhaps  help  to  explain  my  meaning, 
and  may  enable  the  reader  better  to  understand  the  purpose  of  all  my 
other  hints. 


[G.] 

It  had  always  been  the  impression,  I  believe,  upon  the  minds  both  of 
ordinary  readers  and  of  scholars,  that  the  Comedian  of  Athens  intended 
to  represent  Socrates  as  a  Sophist,  who  was  corrupting  the  old  spirit  of 
Greece,  with  modern  philosophical  refinements.  Upon  this  view  of  the 
case,  Aristophanes,  though  he  may  have  entirely  mistaken  the  character 
and  objects  of  the  person  whom  he  was  ridiculing,  will  still  confirm  the 
impression  which  we  derive  from  other  sources,  that  he  was  emphatically 
a  moral  teacher,  that  he  meddled  with  physical  speculations  only  just  so 
far  as  they  illustrated  his  principles  concerning  the  life  of  man,  that  his 
great  effort  was  to  awaken  men  to  self-knowledge.  A  Teacher  who 
asserted  that  a  constant  conflict  was  going  on  in  man  between  two  prin- 
ciples, one  drawing  him  upwards,  one  dragging  him  to  earth,  might 
easily  be  represented  as  keeping  a  right  and  a  wrong  reason,  and  being 
able  upon  all  fitting  occasions  to  make  the  latter  predominant.  One  who 
urged  his  pupils  to  study  the  meaning  of  words,  might  be  plausibly 


NOTES. 


579 


accused  of  inventing  the  most  subtle  and  aerial  distinctions.  One  who 
wished  to  guide  them  through  the  thick  coming  thoughts  and  fancies 
which  the  teachings  of  the  sophists  had  stirred  up  within  them  to  a  solid 
foundation,  might  easily  be  suspected  of  administering  to  the  growth  of 
self-consciousness,  and  so  of  interfering  with  simple  and  practical  life. 
These  charges  are  just  such  as  any  man  coming  into  a  vicious  state  of 
society,  and  seeking  to  reform  it,  not  by  preaching  about  the  past,  but  by 
actually  entering  into  the  present,  and  endeavouring  to  find  a  way  out 
of  its  confusions,  must  always  incur.  It  is  the  best  proof  which  can  be 
afforded  of  the  talent  of  Aristophanes,  that  he  so  clearly  understood  the 
kind  of  work  in  which  Socrates  was  engaged ;  the  best  excuse  for  his 
character,  that  he  confounded  him  with  persons  who  deserved  all  repro- 
bation, and  whom  he  was,  by  a  very  different  course  to  that  which  the 
Comedian  followed,  refuting  and  exposing. 

But  a  modern  editor  of  Aristophanes,  Mr.  Mitchell,  whose  English 
notes,  whose  criticisms,  and  whose  previous  translations,  are  likely  to 
make  his  work  very  popular,  has  promulgated  an  entirely  new  theory 
upon  this  subject.  He  maintains  that  the  notion  of  the  objects  of  Socrates 
which  we  obtain  from  either  of  his  disciples,  or  from  tradition,  is  utterly 
false  ;  that  he  was  primarily,  and  almost  exclusively,  a  physical  philos- 
opher, that  as  such  he  is  ridiculed  in  the  Clouds,  and  that  the  hero  of  that 
part  of  the  play  which  seems  to  describe  him  in  another  character,  is 
really  not  Socrates  but  Euripides  ! 

The  last  hypothesis  will,  I  should  think,  be  a  much  more  effectual 
confutation  of  this  ingenious  scheme,  than  any  arguments  which  can  be 
brought  against  it.  To  prove  his  point  against  the  philosopher,  Mr. 
Mitchell  is  obliged  to  destroy  our  respect  for  the  genius  of  his  own 
favourite  poet.  For  he  represents  this  his  most  elaborate  composition  as 
utterly  deficient  in  unity  of  purpose  or  principle,  as  nothing  but  a  col- 
lection of  incoherent  lampoons  upon  two  persons,  who  it  would  appear 
were  not  even  connected  by  a  common  object  or  by  the  same  class  of 
pursuits  One  can  scarcely  imagine  a  more  satisfactory  confirmation  of 
the  common  opinion,  that  Socrates  was  what  Xenophon  and  Plato  (much 
as  they  differ  in  the  character  of  their  minds,  and  in  their  ways  of  regard- 
ing their  master)  both  represent  him  to  have  been,  than  that  which  is 
supplied  by  this  desperate  effort  to  set  it  aside. 

So  far  as  the  assertion  in  the  text  is  concerned,  these  remarks  might 
be  sufficient.  But  I  cannot  help  perceiving  that  Mr.  Mitchell's  remarks 
on  this  point  are  in  strict  accordance  with  those  which  he  is  everywhere 
endeavouring  to  propagate,  respecting  Greek  philosophy  generally,  and 
that  he  is  availing  himself,  it  seems  to  me  most  mischievously,  of  Christian 
feelings  and  prejudices  in  support  of  them.  In  a  passage  of  his  Preface 
to  the  Clouds,  he  gives  it  as  his  opinion,  that  the  highest  honour  which 
Pythagoras  ever  received  was  to  be  made  1  the  hero  and  object  of  ridicule 
in  one  of  Lucian's  unmatched  dialogues.'    He  speaks  of  him  and  of 


580 


NOTES. 


Epimenides  and  Empedocles  as  1  impostors '  and  '  Charlatans.'  And 
having  assumed  that  Socrates  belonged  to  the  same  class  of  thinkers 
with  them,  and  received  much  of  his  teaching  from  the  Italian  school,  he 
leaves  his  readers  to  draw  the  inference  that  he  was  an  impostor  and 
charlatan  also. 

As  our  notices  of  Pythagoras,  though  sufficient  to  show  that  the 
greatest  among  the  Greeks  regarded  him  with  respect  and  admiration, 
are  rather  scattered  and  miscellaneous,  my  readers  may  wish  to  know 
something  of  the  process  by  which  Mr.  Mitchell  arrives  at  his  conclusions 
respecting  him.  Perhaps  they  may  suppose  that  he  collects  the  remarks 
respecting  him,  which  are  to  be  found  in  Plato  and  Aristotle,  that  he  then 
resorts  to  Diogenes  Laertius,  and  finally  avails  himself  of  any  hints 
which  Cicero  either  from  Greek  or  Italian  sources  may  be  able  to  supply. 
No,  our  author  disdains  all  these  vulgar  methods.  His  authorities  are 
derived  from  a  period  subsequent  to  the  Christian  era.  He  takes  the  life 
of  Apollonius  of  Tyana  by  the  sophist  Philostratus.  He  finds  that  this 
mythical  hero  equipped  himself  in  the  cast-off  garments  of  the  Samian, 
inventing,  he  fairly  confesses,  some  stories,  but  in  alL  probability  "  finding 
others  ready  made  to  his  hand ;'  the  chief  ground  for  this  last  opinion 
being  that  '  the  immortal  Lucian '  believed  or  feigned  to  believe  them. 
Out  of  these  materials  Mr.  Mitchell  constructs  a  Pythagoras,  and  thence 
by  the  easiest  process  imaginable  (his  former  hypothesis  being  admitted), 
a  Socrates. 

I  entreat  my  reader  to  verify  these  assertions,  by  turning  to  the  pre- 
face of  which  I  have  spoken ;  for  I  do  not  ask  him  to  believe  on  my 
authority  that  any  scholar  conversant  with  the  laws  of  historical  evidence, 
has  adopted  such  a  course  for  discovering  the  character  and  merits  of  an 
ancient  teacher.  It  is  quite  superfluous  to  observe  in  what  way  the  pre- 
cedent might  be  applied  to  other  cases.  Of  course  if  any  Father  or 
Apostle  has  been  chosen  for  the  subject  of  a  biography  by  an  Italian 
monk  of  the  last  or  present  century,  who  has  discovered  his  relics  and 
wrought  miracles  with  them,  that  biography  must  henceforth  be  received 
as  genuine ;  upon  the  strength  of  it  the  Father  or  Apostle  of  it  must  be 
pronounced  an  impostor  or  charlatan,  provided  only  Voltaire  or  some 
other  immortal  Lucian  of  the  west  has  adopted  it  as  the  warrant  for  his 
jests.  Nevertheless  Mr.  Mitchell's  statements  will  in  many  quarters  be 
eagerly  received.  There  are  some  who  seem  to  think  that  the  proof  of 
the  divine  origin  and  worth  of  Christianity  depends  upon  the  mean  esti- 
mate which  we  form  of  all  the  wise  men  whom  Greece  produced  in  its 
best  days ;  that  if  we  can  but  succeed  in  wiping  out  the  respect  for  them, 
no  matter  by  what  means,  there  is  a  tabula  rasa  on  which  we  may  inscribe 
all  the  feelings  and  principles  of  the  New  Testament.  Alas !  what  a 
tabula  rasa !  one  on  which  scorn,  skepticism,  indifference  to  all  earnest 
hopes,  unbelief  in  any  principle,  have  been  written  in  the  deepest  char- 
acters beforehand  !    These  are  the  preparations  for  the  Gospel !  These 


NOTES. 


581 


are  the  habits  of  mind  which  we  are  to  foster  in  order  that  we  may  feel 
our  own  nothingness,  and  our  need  of  a  Divine  Teacher,  and  may  believe 
that  we  have  one  !  That  facts  are  against  such  a  notion  ;  that  the  skeptics 
and  scoffers  of  the  ages  after  Christianity  had  been  proclaimed,  were  not 
the  men  most  ready  to  receive  it ;  that  those  who  were  most  earnestly 
and  truly  holding  fast  that  wThich  they  had,  seeking  for  God  by  every 
light  which  Mythology  or  Philosophy  threw  in  their  way,  were  those 
who  most  welcomed  the  voice  of  the  messenger  bringing  good  tidings, 
and  saying,  Behold  your  God — this  is  certain.  Nevertheless  in  the  teeth 
of  the  clearest  evidence  of  this  kind,  we  suppose  that  we  are  proving 
Christianity  to  be  that  which  all  men  want,  by  proving  that  all  those 
who  showed  they  did  want  it  were  imposing  upon  others  or  upon 
themselves. 

The  ground  for  such  a  suspicion  is  however  the  point  upon  which  I 
am  most  anxious  to  speak.  It  is  this  :  whenever  these  heathen  philoso- 
phers perceived  a  great  moral  principle,  the  knowledge  of  which  they 
believed  might  be  for  the  good  of  ages  unborn,  they  said  they  were 
inspired.  Now  that  they  were  ignorant  of  the  conditions,  under  which 
spiritual  life  and  wisdom  are  communicated  ;  that  the  belief  of  being 
taught  from  above  produced  an  intoxication  which  at  times  carried  them 
into  extravagant  courses ;  that  it  may  have  ultimately  engendered  a 
vanity  which  was  the  parent  of  real  impostures,  I  make  no  doubt.  But 
I  ask,  is  it  safe,  in  spite  of  all  these  facts,  to  say  that  honesty  of  purpose, 
and  real  positive  wisdom,  were  the  fruits  of  delusion  and  falsehood  ?  All 
that  is  sincere  in  my  mind  revolts  against  such  an  opinion.  Good  pro- 
duces good,  lies  bring  forth  lies  ;  what  there  was  of  deceit  in  these  men 
led  to  evil  results,  kept  up  a  superstition  which  was  ultimately  exposed 
and  which  carried  away  much  sound  faith  along  with  it ;  but  they  did 
some  good,  great  good.  Did  this  come  from  any  hollowness  and  trickery, 
Mt]  ytvoixo  !  It  must  have  come  from  deep  and  wise  counsels  ;  earnest 
meditations;  loving  feelings.  And  whence  came  these?  Aie  we  just 
because  we  are  Christians,  to  say  it  was  pretence  and  cheating  to  affirm 
that  they  came  from  the  source  of  all  truth  and  good?  Are  we  just 
because  we  know  that  not  only  rains  and  fruitful  seasons,  but  all  holy 
thoughts,  good  counsels  and  just  works  have  a  divine  Author,  to  say  that 
the  dim  recognition  of  this  truth  by  elder  men  was  actually  a  crime  ;  that 
they  would  have  been  better  and  wiser  if  they  had  taken  the  honour  to 
themselves  ?  Yet  we  must  charge  this  humility  upon  them  as  a  sin,  if 
we  are  determined  to  adopt  the  Pelagian  doctrine,  that  the  good  which 
was  in  these  men  had  its  root  in  human  nature,  existing  apart  from  God, 
and  not  in  the  teachings  and  impulses  of  the  divine  Word. 


582 


NOTES. 


[D.j 

The  reader  will  find  in  Mr.  Coleridge's  '  Aids  to  Reflection,'  a  most 
valuable  passage  on  the  subject  of  Mysticism,  in  which  the  two  senses  of 
the  word  to  which  I  have  alluded  in  the  text  are  finely  and  accurately 
distinguished.  The  instances  which  are  there  referred  to,  as  illustrating 
the  way  in  which  a  profound  apprehension  of  the  law  and  mystery  of  our 
own  being,  derived  either  from  the  simple  study  of  the  word  of  God,  or 
from  that  study  improved  by  reading  and  cultivation,  may  connect  itself 
with  notions  and  allegories  suggested  by  the  fancies  of  particular  minds, 
are  those  of  Buhme  and  Fenelon.  They  are  most  happily  chosen — the 
one  as  exhibiting  the  most  perfect  type  of  Protestant,  the  other  of  Romish, 
mysticism.  But  the  instance  of  Philo  is  perhaps  more  striking  and  im- 
portant than  either.  No  one  who  looks  into  his  writings  can  fancy  for 
an  instant  that  he  was  not  a  laborious  student  of  the  Bible.  To  no  one 
does  the  charge  often  preferred  against  spiritualists,  of  undervaluing  the 
Scriptures,  and  substituting  for  them  the  wisdom  which  they  had  derived 
from  some  other  quarter,  apply  less  than  to  him.  He  evidently  regarded 
his  own  sacred  writings  as  more  precious  than  all  other  books  together. 
He  evidently  traced  up  all  his  thoughts  and  discoveries  to  the  light  which 
he  had  received  from  them.  Nevertheless  it  is  true,  that  Philo's  Scrip- 
ture readings  would  most  utterly  confound  any  one  who  had  been  used 
to  look  at  the  text  with  simplicity.  Such  a  person  would  not,  I  think,  be 
inclined  to  say,  (as  nine  out  often  who  are  not  simple  readers,  but  who 
bring  to  the  study  all  the  artificial  notions  and  habits  of  their  own  time, 
certainly  would  say,)  '  all  this  is  mere  stuff  and  nonsense.'  He  would 
perceive  that  there  is  something  in  it  to  which  such  words  are  very  inap- 
plicable indeed,  nay,  that  there  is  a  continuous  stream  of  thought  through 
every  part  of  his  exposition,  by  following  which,  we  become  convinced 
that  the  records  he  is  speaking  of  have  an  internal  unity.  At  the  same 
time,  I  am  quite  sure  that  the  best  and  truest  reader  will  be  conscious  of 
most  restlessness  and  impatience,  when  he  finds  the  records  of  a  simple 
practical  life,  turned  into  a  set  of  high-flown  conceits  and  allegories  about 
the  different  moral  virtues,  and  the  sensible  and  rational  part  in  man. 

How  then  are  we  to  distinguish  the  solid  and  the  real  from  the  fan- 
tastic in  these  remarkable  books?  It  seems  to  me  that  the  position  of 
Philo  supplies  the  answer.  Nowhere  so  well  as  in  Alexandria  could  a 
man  learn  what  were  the  feelings  and  necessities  of  men,  especially  of 
thoughtful  men,  in  the  heathen  world,  what  it  was  that  philosophers  were 
seeking  after,  what  was  requisite  to  satisfy  their  inquiries.  Nowhere  so 
ill  as  in  Alexandria  could  a  man  find  any  thing  which  should  interpret  to 
him  the  simply  domestic  life  or  the  national  feelings  and  sympathies  of 
the  Jewish  people.  Going  with  the  advantages  which  one  kind  of  know- 
ledge gave  him,  to  the  study  of  his  Scriptures,  he  found  everywhere 
hints  of  a  divine  Teacher,  who  was  guiding  men  out  of  the  ways  of 


NOTES. 


583 


sense,  out  of  slavery  to  visible  appearances,  into  the  acknowledgment  of 
an  unseen  Being.  He  knew  how  the  reason  in  man  had  striven  against 
the  impressions  of  sense,  had  striven  to  realize  an  object  answerable  to 
itself ;  here  he  found  the  other  side  of  the  picture.  Here  was  the  Reason 
of  God  leading  that  higher  faculty  which  he  had  imparted  to  his  creature 
to  seek  after  him  and  to  find  him.  Going  with  his  ignorance  to  the  same 
books — the  real  practical  conflicts,  the  human  doings,  the  outward  crosses 
of  those  whom  they  speak  of,  became  to  him  mere  pictures  and  images 
of  certain  mental  feelings  and  operations;  he  could  recognise  the  world 
of  human  relations,  only  as  an  image  world  ;  he  was  utterly  unprepared 
for  the  mystery  of  the  Word  made  Flesh.  The  first  class  of  his  thoughts 
connect  him  with  the  most  thoughtful  men  of  all  times,  living  in  a  posi- 
tion the  most  unlike  his  own ;  the  latter  connect  him  with  them  indeed  so 
far  as  this,  that  they  as  well  as  he  have  been  prone  to  read  their  own  cir- 
cumstances and  states  of  mind  in  the  universal  book,  but  those  circum- 
stances and  states  of  mind  being  different  from  his,  there  is  little  in  their 
speculations  to  support  his,  or  in  his  to  afford  an  excuse  for  theirs. 

My  object  is  not  to  give  the  reader  any  account  of  Philo's  Scriptural 
allegories,  nor  even*  to  show  how  the  acknowledgment  of  the  Divine 
Word  is  worked  into  the  whole  tissue  of  his  thoughts.  My  wish  is 
merely  to  illustrate  the  way  in  w7hich  he  represents  the  Word  as  a 
Teacher  ;  in  which  he  connects  that  teaching  with  the  Reason  of  man  ; 
in  which  he  describes  it  as  universal.  The  other  side  of  the  subject,  his 
hints  respecting  the  relation  between  the  Word  and  the  Absolute  Being, 
are  in  the  strictly  theological  sense  more  important.  But  I  shall  allude 
to  them  here  only  so  far  as  they  illustratethe  point  which  belongs  strictly 
to  the  history  of  Quakerism.  I  pass  over  then  his  assertion  that  the 
Divine  Word  was  at  once  the  framer  of  things  and  the  image  after 
which  they  were  framed,  (see  the  book  on  the  Mosaic  history  of  Creation, 
C.i.  beginning  nooXafiiov  yao  6  &sbq  to  ch.  v.  7rob<;  alrjdtictv  dyaSov^)  and  all 
other  passages  which  refer  to  the  physical  universe,  even  though  they 
may  speak  of  an  intellectual  (noetic)  universe  as  the  type  of  this.  Nor 
will  I  dwell  upon  his  comment  on  the  words,  "  and  the  Lord  God  took 
the  man  whom  he  had  made,  and  set  him  in  the  Garden,  to  till  it  and  to 
watch  over  it" — where  he  speaks  of  a  distinction  between  that  mind 
which  was  merely  formed  (TtXaoenq),  and  that  which  was  created,  this 
last,  being  "  a  pure  reason,  unparticipant  of  corrupt  matter,  enjoying  a 
purer  and  more  untainted  constitution,  which  pure  reason  God  appre- 
hends, not  suffering  it  to  go  from  him,  but  placing  it  as  the  watchman  and 
governor  of  the  different  virtues  which  he  has  planted  and  made  to  bud 
around  it." — (Allegories,  Book  i.  §.  28.)  Nor  will  I  more  than  allude  to 
his  remark,  which  supplies  an  important  limitation  to  the  former  words, 
that  Cain  and  Abel  represent  "  two  opposite  and  conflicting  opinions, 
the  one  whereof  refers  all  things  to  the  reason,  as  if  it  were  the  guide  of 
thought,  of  feeling,  of  motion,  of  power ;  the  other  refers  to  God  as  being 


584 


NOTES. 


his  workmanship.  With  which  two  opinions,  he  adds,  the  same  soul 
travails.  But  when  they  are  brought  forth,  they  must  needs  be  divided, 
since  it  is  utterly  impossible  for  such  enemies  to  dwell  together."  (On 
the  sacrifices  of  Cain  and  Abel,  §  1.) 

Such  passages  as  the  following  are  more  directly  to  our  purpose,  and 
will  be  a  key  to  the  others.  It  is  taken  from  a  treatise  on  the  '  Hus- 
bandry of  Noah,'  which  is  of  course  allegorized  after  the  author's  usual 
fashion. 

"  Wherefore  it  is  needful  that  our  Reason,  like  a  goatherd,  or  cow- 
herd, or  shepherd,  or  keeper  of  cattle  generally,  should  have  rule,  choos- 
ing that  which  is  convenient  before  that  which  is  pleasant  either  to  itself 
or  to  the  inferior  creatures.  Nevertheless,  that  the  different  portions  of 
the  soul  are  not  left  ungoverned,  but  have  the  blessing  of  a  faultless  and 
altogether  good  Shepherd,  under  whose  conduct  it  is  impossible  that  the 
council  of  thoughts  should  be  disturbed  and  scattered,  we  must  attribute, 
finally,  and  we  might  say  exclusively,  to  the  oversight  of  God  Himself. 
For  so  it  is  shown  to  be  of  necessity  under  one  and  the  same  order,  in 
that  it  looks  up  to  one  Overseer,  since  the  being  obliged  to  serve  many 
different  rulers  is  an  intolerable  calamity.  And  so  good  a  thing  is  this 
office  of  the  Shepherd,  that  it  is  rightly  ascribed  not  to  kings  only,  and 
to  wise  men,  and  to  souls  purified  for  the  highest  mysteries,  but  to  God 
the  universal  Ruler  Himself.  The  authority  for  this  is  not  some  insigni- 
ficant person,  but  a  prophet,  a  psalmist,  whom  we  may  well  trust.  For  he 
speaks  thus,  1  The  Lord  is  my  Shepherd,  and  I  shall  not  want.'  Let 
each  man  say  the  same  in  his  own  part  and  measure  ;  for  this  is  a  song 
which  it  is  comely  for  every  godly  man  to  meditate  and  sing  over  with 
himself,  and  which  at  the  same  time  properly  appertains  to  the  whole 
universe.  For  water,  and  air,  and  fire,  and  whatsoever  vegetables  or 
animals  are  in  these,  things  mortal,  and  things  divine,  the  nature  of  the 
heavens,  the  courses  of  the  Sun  and  Moon,  the  movements  and  harmo- 
nious dances  of  the  other  Stars,  as  if  they  formed  one  sheepfold,  doth 
God,  as  Shepherd  and  King,  guide  according  to  order  and  law,  setting 
over  them  his  true  Word,  his  first  begotten  Son,  who  is  ready  like  the 
viceroy  of  a  great  king  to  receive  and  to  render  up  the  care  of  this  holy 
flock.  Let  then  the  whole  world,  that  greatest  and  most  perfect  sheep- 
fold  of  the  true  God  say,  1  The  Lord  is  my  Shepherd,  I  shall  not  want.' 
Let  each  say  the  same  individually;  not  with  that  voice  that  comes 
through  the  tongue  and  mouth,  which  spreads  through  but  a  little  por- 
tion of  air,  but  with  the  far-reaching  voice  of  the  mind,  which  touches 
the  very  boundaries  of  the  universe." 

I  do  not  quote  this  passage  for  the  sake  of  its  style,  which  is  perhaps 
somewhat  inflated,  but  as  a  fair  exposition  of  the  idea  which  is  expanded 
through  the  whole  treatise ;  the  idea,  I  mean,  that  the  living  Word  is 
the  shepherd  and  teacher  of  the  inner  man ;  ordaining  the  whole  con- 
stitution of  the  mind,  and  holding  direct  and  continual  converse  with 


NOTES. 


5S5 


it.  In  precisely  the  same  spirit  is  the  following  passage  from  another 
work. 

"But  it  is  a  fearful  thing  for  the  soul  to  ascend  into  the  contempla- 
tion of  The  Being  by  itself*  not  knowing  the  way,  and  at  the  same  time 
lifted  up  by  its  ignorance  and  boldness.  Great  are  the  falls  which  hap- 
pen from  such  defect  of  knowledge  and  foolish  daring.  Wherefore 
Moses  prays  that  he  may  have  God  Himself  for  his  guide  in  the  way 
which  leads  to  Him.  For  he  saith,  '  If  thou  wilt  not  go  with  me,  lead 
me  not  up  from  hence.'  Therefore  every  movement  without  the  divine 
direction  and  oversight  leadeth  to  evil.  And  it  were  better  to  remain 
here  below,  leading  this  confused  beggarly  mortal  life,  as  the  greater 
part  of  men  do,  than  having  lifted  ourselves  up  to  heaven,  through  boast- 
ing to  be  turned  back  and  confounded,  which  calamity  has  happened 
to  multitudes  of  sophists,  who  have  fancied  that  wisdom  consisted  in  the 
invention  of  persuasive  words,  not  in  the  most  true  faith  of  things. 
Perhaps  also  something  of  this  kind  is  signified.  1  Do  not  lift  me  up  on 
high  by  giving  me  wealth,  or  fame,  or  honour,  or  power,  or  whatever 
else  belongs  to  the  things  called  good,  if  Thou  wilt  not  Thyself  accom- 
pany them.'  For  these  oftentimes  procure  the  greatest  curses  and  bless- 
ings to  those  who  have  them — blessings  when  God  Himself  is  the  guide 
of  the  mind;  curses,  when  He  is  not.  For  to  multitudes  those  things 
which  are  called  goods,  have  been  the  causes  of  intolerable  evils ;  but  he 
that  followeth  God  uses  as  the  fellows  and  comrades  of  his  journey  those 
Xoyoi  whom  it  is  customary  to  name  angels.  For  it  is  written  'that  Abra- 
ham went  with  them  leading  them  on  the  way.'  O  beautiful  equality 
when  the  guide  is  himself  guided,  giving  what  he  receiveth,  not  one 
thing  in  place  of  another,  but  the  very  same  thing  reciprocated !  For 
while  he  is  not  yet  perfected,  he  useth  the  divine  Word  as  the  leader  or 
the  way.  For  the  oracle  is,  '  Behold  I  send  My  angel  with  thee  before 
thy  face,  that  he  may  keep  thee  in  the  way,  that  he  may  lead  thee  to  the 
land  which  I  have  prepared  for  thee ;  give  heed  to  him  and  hearken  to 
him,  disobey  him  not,  for  My  word  is  in  him.'  But  when  he  hath  come  to 
the  highest  point  of  knowledge,  vigorously  running  on,  he  will  measure 
his  paces  with  him  who  was  before  leading  him  in  the  way.  For  both 
will  become  followers  of  God,  the  universal  Guide."  (On  the  Migration 
of  Abraham,  '  31.) 

Whatever  may  be  thought  of  the  somewhat  startling  words  with 
which  this  passage  concludes,  no  one,  I  think,  can  read  them  without 
feeling  more  clearly  and  strongly  what  the  purpose  of  the  epistle  to  the 
Hebrews,  especially  of  the  first  chapter,  is,  and  at  the  same  time  without 
obtaining  a  clearer  light,  respecting  that  form  of  Gnosticism,  which  con- 
nected itself  with  Jewish  ideas.  These  Aoyoi  or  angels,  ministers  of  God 
and  to  man,  the  Jew  could  recognise  in  his  Scriptures  ;  might  not  Jesus 
be  one  of  these?  Neither  absolutely  divine  nor  absolutely  human ;  but 
belonging  to  a  middle  race  between  Godhead  and  Humanity?  The 


586 


NOTES. 


writer  of  the  epistle  meets  this  opinion.  He  proves  that  the  Scriptures 
speak  of  one  who  is  not  one  of  the  Aoyot,  but  the  A6yo^  not  a  Son  of  God 
buttfte  Son  of  God.  And  then  he  goes  on  to  show  how  this  Son  of  God 
verily  apprehended  not  the  angels  but  the  seed  of  Abraham.  The  re- 
mark of  course  is  familiar  to  all  students  of  theology.  But  it  may  not  be 
wholly  useless  to  suggest  it  to  younger  men,  as  one  of  the  proofs  that  all 
the  Scriptures  become  unintelligible  and  incoherent,  when  the  idea  upon 
which  I  am  dwelling  is  lost  sight  of. 

The  following  extract  from  the  treatise,  '  On  the  confusion  of  tongues," 
has  the  same  kind  of  value.  Phiio  has  been  speaking  of  the  words, 
'  The  tower  which  the  sons  of  men  have  builded.'  He  supposes  some 
jester  to  ask,  why  this  phrase  should  be  used,  for  who  else  but  sons  of 
men  were  likely  to  build  cities  and  towers?  He  answers,  that  these 
words  were  not  used  carelessly  or  without  a  meaning.  By  them  it  i3 
intimated,  that  the  builders  of  the  tower  were  men  who  were  pursuing  a 
multitude  of  objects,  and  had  lost  sight  of  the  one  Creator  and  Father  of  all. 
He  then  adds,  "  but  the  truly  wise  are  fittingly  called  the  sons  of  the  one 
God,  as  Moses  confesseth,  where  he  saith,  '  Ye  are  the  sons  of  the  Lord 
your  God;'  and  again,  'God  that  begat  thee.'  And  this  belongs  to 
those  who  have  fashioned  their  souls  to  think,  that  that  which  is  in  itself 
pure  and  beautiful  is  the  only  good  which  is  set  up  as  the  opposite  fortress 
to  that  of  pleasure,  and  serves  for  its  subversion  and  overthrow.  And 
though  a  man  may  not  yet  be  fit  to  be  called  son  of  God,  yet  let 
him  strive  to  fashion  himself  after  his  first  begotten  Word,  the  eldest  of 
the  angels :  the  archangel  of  many  names ;  for  He  is  called  '  Begin- 
ning,' and  '  Name  of  God,'  and  '  Word,'  and  1  The  Man  according  to  the 
divine  Image  (6  /.ax  tixova  avd-i)ono(;)\  and  'He  that  looketh  upon  Is- 
rael.' *  *  *  For  though  we  are  not  yet  reckoned  sons  of  God,  yet  we 
may  be  called  so  of  '  His  eternal  Image' — '  the  most  holy  Word  ;'  for 
this  most  venerable  Word  is  the  image  of  God." 

So  in  a  very  cabalistic  commentary  upon  the  fifteenth  chapter  of 
Genesis,  he  says,  in  reference  to  the  words,  '  he  divided  not  the  birds  :' 
"  For  the  word  of  God,  solitary  and  monadic  in  the  multitude  of  things 
that  have  become,  and  that  are  to  perish,  remaineth  uncompounded, 
ever  wont  to  ascend  upwards,  and  studying  to  be  the  companion  of  the 
One.  Wherefore  there  are  these  two  undivided  natures,  that  in  us  of 
Reason,  and  that  over  us  of  the  divine  Word.  But  being  undivided,  they 
divide  innumerable  other  things.  For  the  divine  Word  hath  divided  the 
things  in  nature,  and  hath  distributed  them  all.  And  this  reason  of  ours, 
whatever  things  or  bodies  it  hath  reasonably  taken  in,  these  it  dis- 
tinguishes by  innumerable  ways,  into  innumerable  parts,  and  never 
ceaseth  from  its  dissections.  And  this  comes  to  pass  through  the  like- 
ness which  it  hath  to  the  Creator  and  Father  of  the  whole.  For  the  divinity 
being  unmixed,  uncompounded,  without  parts,  hath  been  to  all  the  world 
the  cause  of  mixture,  combination,  apportionment.   So  it  is  fitting  that 


NOTES. 


587 


those  things  which  are  like  to  it,  to  wit,  the  reason  in  us,  and  that  which 
is  above  us,  being  without  parts  and  undivided,  should  be  able,  with 
mighty  force,  to  divide  and  discriminate  each  of  the  things  that  are." 
(Who  is  the  Inheritor  of  divine  things  1)    Sect.  48. 

There  is  a  very  striking  passage  in  the  early  part  of  the  first  book  on 
Dreams,  which  I  would  recommend  to  the  attention  of  the  reader,  as  an 
illustration  of  the  way  in  which  Philo  connected  the  idea  of  Science  or 
Knowledge,  with  submission  to  the  divine  guidance.  So  far  from  look- 
ing upon  Science  as  something  directly  opposed  to  Faith,  he  speaks  of  it 
as  being  the  direct  opposite  of  Sense;  a  very  remarkable  thought  in- 
deed, which  he  might  have  received  from  Plato,  but  which  certainly 
seemed  to  him  in  strict  harmony  with  the  teaching  of  his  own  lawgiver 
and  prophets. 

The  evidence  respecting  Philo's  opinion  of  the  universality  of  the  di- 
vine teaching  is  not  to  be  gathered  from  particular  passages,  so  much  as 
from  the  whole  spirit  of  his  books.  In  all  the  language  which  1  have 
quoted  there  is  a  constant  reference  to  the  teaching  of  the  Word,  as  having 
reference  to  man.  There  is  an  absence  of  any  attempt  to  limit  the  bless- 
ing within  his  own  nation.  In  an  indifferent  Jew,  or  one  who  set  but  lit- 
tle store  by  his  own  Scriptures,  looking  upon  the  heathen  writers  as 
more  profound  or  advanced  than  they  were,  this  would  have  been 
natural.  But  with  his  extraordinary  admiration  and  deep  study  of  the 
Jewish  writings,  a  study  and  admiration  implying  too  the  greatest  thank- 
fulness for  their  original  separation,  and  for  the  ordinances  which  dis- 
tinguished them  from  other  people,  one  might  have  expected  to  find  indi- 
cations here  and  there  of  the  feeling  which  characterized  hi3  country- 
men generally.  It  is  evident,  however,  that  his  acknowledgment  of  the 
wisdom  and  knowledge  of  God,  as  the  great  objects  and  rewards  of  hu- 
man search,  and  the  highest  gifts  the  Creator  can  bestow,  led  him  to 
look  upon  the  Jew  who,  as  be  believed,  had  all  facilities  for  this  pursuit, 
as  in  a  far  higher  condition  than  he  would  have  been,  if  he  had  had  the 
right  to  treat  other  men  as  utterly  outcasts  and  aliens.  We  are  not, 
however,  left  to  conjecture  or  inference  upon  the  subject.  There  is  an 
especial  treatise  on  the  Thesis,  that  'every  virtuous  man  is  a  free- 
man.' In  this  treatise  he  lays  it  down  as  a  maxim,  supporting  him- 
self by  a  line  of  Sophocles,  that  "he  only  is  free,  who  hath  God  as  his 
guide."    §  3. 

And  then  when  he  has  expounded  the  conditions  and  characteristics 
of  freedom,  he  meets  the  question,  where  have  such  men  as  you  imagine 
ever  been,  or  where  are  they  now  ?  He  answers,  that  men,  however 
rare,  are  to  be  found  who  excelled  in  virtue ;  followed  God  as  their  only 
guide ;  lived  according  to  the  right  law  of  nature,  who  were  not  free 
only  themselves,  but  inspired  their  neighbours  with  free  thoughts.  Such 
men  he  discovers  in  Greece  among  the  'seven  wise  men among  some 
of  the  philosophers  of  the  Eleatic  School ;  in  India  among  the  gymnos- 


588  NOTES. 

ophists  ;  in  Persia  among  the  magians.  From  his  express  words,  and 
from  the  habitual  tone  of  his  thoughts,  it  is  evident  that  he  did  not  look 
upon  these  men  as  wise  or  good,  in  virtue  of  any  intrinsic  quality,  or 
because  each  man  might  be  saved  by  his  own  religion,  but  because, 
amidst  whatever  perplexities  and  contradictions,  they  followed  the  one 
Guide  and  Shepherd,  who  had  revealed  Himself  to  Abraham  and  Isaac 
and  Jacob ;  that  unseen  and  everlasting  Word,  who  had  entered  into 
covenant  with  the  Jews,  and  had  brought  them  out  of  sensible  idolatry  ? 
into  the  light  and  liberty  of  his  children. 


In  some  recent  English  attacks  upon  the  Fathers  (I  do  not  refer  to 
that  of  Mr.  Taylor,  who  has  taken  a  somewhat  different  line)  the  charge 
of  adopting  the  Quaker  doctrine  respecting  the  Logos,  was  put  very 
prominently  forward.  But  these  writers  did  not  know  how  strong  their 
case  was.  They  fancied  that  the  Greek  Fathers  were  merely  advancing 
this  notion  as  one  among  a  great  number  of  others.  They  should  have 
said  boldly,  '  This  heresy  is  not  one  which  these  teachers  took  up  acci- 
dentally ;  it  is  woven  into  the  very  tissue  of  their  thoughts;  their  minds 
were  infected  by  it  to  the  very  core.  You  might  as  easily  take  away 
the  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  out  of  Luther,  as  this  doctrine  out  of 
them.'  Such  language  as  this  would  have  been  perfectly  true,  and  it 
would  have  brought  matters  much  more  directly  to  an  issue.  If,  for 
instance,  instead  of  giving  a  number  of  extracts,  all  certainly  much  to 
the  point,  but  still  leaving  room  for  the  hope,  that  the  general  tone  of 
thought  in  the  first  three  centuries  might  be  sound,  they  had  given  an 
analysis  of  the  Pedagogus  of  Clemens,  or  indeed  of  any  of  his  other 
writings,  or  had  availed  themselves  of  those  which  the  present  Bishop 
of  Lincoln  has  introduced  into  his  lectures,  they  would  have  left  their 
readers  without  a  doubt,  that  the  acknowledgment  of  the  Divine  Word 
as  the  invisible  teacher  of  man  in  all  periods,  was  involved  in  the  very 
conception  of  Christianity,  which  belonged  to  these  fathers;  that  if  this 
acknowledgment  be  heretical,  Clemens,  and  the  Church  generally,  which 
did  not  condemn  him  but  sympathized  with  him  and  regarded  him  as 
one  of  its  greatest  lights,  were  habitually,  wilfully,  radically  heretical. 
Let  such  an  opinion  be  but  stated  in  terms,  together  with  the  ordinary 
defence  of  it,  that  by  this  doctrine  the  authority  and  inspiration  of  the 
Scriptures  are  set  at  nought ;  and  we,  who  believe  this  principle  to  be 
involved  in  every  part  of  Scripture,  who  cannot  see  any  grounds  for  its 
authority  and  inspiration  when  it  is  denied,  who  attribute  much  of  the 
lifelessness  of  the  Church  in  our  day,  much  of  the  feebleness  of  our  the- 
ology, much  of  our  strife  and  division,  to  the  habitual  disregard  of  it, 
will  be  able  frankly  to  state  the  grounds  of  our  belief*  and  by  God's 


NOTES. 


589 


grace,  to  encounter  any  consequences  which  may  follow  from  the  pro- 
fession of  it 

In  speaking  of  Philo,  I  have  stated  why  I  think  one  of  these  conse- 
quences is  not  the  necessary  adoption  of  all  the  different  theories,  respect- 
ing the  interpretation  of  passages  in  Scripture  and  of  symbols  in  nature, 
which  have  been  promulgated  by  him,  and  by  those  who  have  acknow- 
ledged the  presence  of  an  invisible  teacher.  Of  course,  I  cannot  be  so 
inconsistent  as  to  deny  the  application  of  the  same  principle  to  the  study 
ol  the  Fathers.  I  have  stated  in  another  part  of  this  volume,  why  I 
suppose  they,  just  as  much  as  Philo,  must  have  been  without  the  means 
of  entering  into  the  practical  life  of  the  Hebrews.  I  do  indeed  discover 
in  them  a  very  different  tone  from  that  which  I  find  in  him ;  all  that 
difference  in  tenderness,  consciousness  of  evil,  a  readiness  to  acknowledge 
themselves  in  the  character  of  sinners,  rather  than  to  claim  that  of  saints, 
sympathy  with  men  more  than  with  philosophers,  which  we  might  ex- 
pect from  those  who  acknowledged  a  teacher  who  had  taken  human 
flesh,  who,  as  Clemens  expressed  it,  "assists  in  all  things,  both  as  man 
and  as  God  ;  putting  away  our  sins  as  God ;  training  us  not  to  sin  as 
man."  Above  all,  I  can  trace  in  them  a  sense  of  unity  and  fellowship,  as 
members  of  one  body,  as  inhabited  by  one  Spirit,  as  worshipping  the  one 
Name  of  the  Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Spirit,  which  is  a  contrast  rather 
than  a  resemblance  to  the  isolated  esoterical  temper  of  the  theosophist. 
But  as  to  the  outward  relations  of  life  and  society,  it  seems  as  if  their 
knowledge  must  have  been  very  much  on  a  level ;  and  therefore  one 
cannot  be  surprised  to  find  the  same  habits  of  thought  in  one  as  in  the 
other.  The  hypothesis  which  has  been  put  forward  in  a  late  publication 
that  the  cabalistic  interpretations  of  Scripture  by  the  early  Fathers,  may 
have  been  communicated  by  a  special  revelation,  is  surely  one  of  the 
most  gratuitous  that  was  ever  propounded  by  a  theological  writer.  Its 
plausibility  to  students  who  have  been  used  only  to  ;  modern  Protestant 
divinity,"  arises  from  the  feeling,  "this  is  so  unlike  any  thing  which 
other  persons  say,  that  it  must  have  been  given  directly  by  some  divine 
authority."  But  when  we  turn  to  a  sage  of  an  earlier  time,  who  to  all 
appearance  never  received  the  Gospel  at  all,  who  at  any  rate  has  never 
been  reckoned  among  the  teachers  of  the  Church,  and  find  precisely  the 
same  tone  of  thought  prevailing  in  him,  nay,  probably  a  number  of  the 
very  thoughts  themselves,  which  are  supposed  to  have  been  specially 
imparted  to  Lhe  Christian  sages,  or  to  have  been  sacred  traditions  of  our 
Lord's  own  words :  when  we  find  again  in  the  writings  of  those  whom 
our  patristic  schools  most  despise — of  Protestants  and  Quakers — a  ten- 
dency of  the  same  kind,  nay,  oftentimes  most  curious  resemblances  to 
the  actual  cabala  of  the  first  ages,  we  may  surely  inquire  whether  such 
thoughts  do  not  belong  to  human  nature  under  certain  circumstances  and 
conditions  of  it,  though  they  of  course  presume  that  nature  not  to  be 
untaught  from  above. 


590 


NOTES. 


The  Fathers,  I  apprehend,  would  have  disdained  altogether  the  kind 
of  honour  which  their  admirers  are  seeking  to  put  upon  them.  Believing 
their  hearts  and  reasons  to  be  under  the  teaching  of  the  divine  Word, 
believing  themselves  to  be  created  and  constituted  in  him,  they  will 
have  been  much  more  disposed  to  regard  their  thoughts  respecting  na- 
ture and  Scripture  as  spiritual  intuitions,  than  as  authoritative  traditions. 
That  they  may  have  been  tempted  to  attach  great  sacredness  to  these 
intuitions,  to  speak  of  them  as  if  they  were  certain,  is  very  true.  Every 
one  who  has  them  feels  them  for  a  time  to  be  certain ;  he  cannot  feel 
otherwise.  And  hence  the  value  of  that  corrective  which  was  supplied 
to  this  dangerous  but  inevitable  conviction  in  the  acknowledgment  that 
those  things  only  were  stable  and  everlastingly  true  for  man  which  be- 
longed to  the  whole  Church,  not  those  which  were  the  utterance  of  indi- 
vidual minds.  These  two  principles  balanced  and  harmonized,  seem  to 
supply  the  true  witness  and  protection  against  both  ancient  and  modern 
fanaticism,  against  both  ancient  and  modern  formality.  The  divine  and 
everlasting  Word  is  the  teacher  of  each  man ;  his  guide  through  the 
sensible  into  the  spiritual,  through  the  individual  into  the  universal.  In 
each  man  there  is,  according  to  the  temper  and  habits  of  his  age,  a  con- 
tinual tendency  to  mix  that  which  is  sensual  with  that  which  is  spiritual ; 
that  which  belongs  to  the  idiosyncrasies  of  his  own  mind  with  that  which 
is  permanent  and  for  all.  These  utterances  are  not  meant  to  be  stifled. 
They  remain  as  witnesses  of  what  each  age  is ;  the  truth  which  that 
age  was  especially  to  defend  and  develope,  could  not  be  seen  if  they  were 
withdrawn.  Then  certain  men  of  each  particular  age  say,  that  what 
belongs  to  them  is  true  and  perfect ;  and  other  men  rise  up  to  show 
how  much  deeper  wisdom  was  taught  by  a  former  age.  Each  would 
stamp  with  sacredness  that  which  belongs  to  the  fleeting  accidents  of  a 
particular  period  in  the  world's  history.  But  He  remains  who  is  the 
Father  of  the  everlasting  age,  the  perpetual  Guide  of  the  spirits  of  all 
who  will  obey  him — he  remains  by  the  fixed  records  of  his  own  revelation, 
by  the  fixed  ordinances  of  his  own  Church,  by  the  order  and  succession 
of  his  own  natural  universe,  to  teach  his  servants  how  to  discriminate 
between  that  which  belongs  to  the  constitution  in  which  he  has  placed 
them,  and  that  which  belongs  to  their  own,  or  to  other  men's  apprehen- 
sions of  it.  Take  away  the  belief  of  his  presence,  and  the  teachings  of 
antiquity,  yea,  the  written  Scriptures  of  God  themselves,  become  but 
oppressive  restraints  upon  the  spirit,  unable  to  raise  it  above  its  own 
modes  of  thought,  only  imparting  to  it  a  miserable  sense  that  it  ought  to 
rise,  and  cannot.  Losing  the  conviction,  that  the  whole  Church  is  under 
his  guidance,  we  at  one  moment  affirm  that  we  will  believe  nothing  but 
what  antiquity  tells  us,  or  nothing  but  what  the  Bible  tells  us  ;  the  next 
moment  we  are  the  sport  of  every  dreamer,  who  affirms  that  he  has  the 
Spirit  which  the  Bible  and  the  Fathers  spoke  of.  For  he  speaks  to 
something  within  us  which  tells  us  that  we  are  meant  to  follow  a  living 


NOTES. 


591 


and  not  a  dead  voice,  and  because  we  will  not  receive  the  truth  which  is 
implied  in  that  witness,  it  becomes  to  us  a  mischievous  falsehood.  We 
do  not  acknowledge  the  Word,  the  great  distinguisher  between  light  and 
darkness,  truth  and  falsehood,  "  the  discerner  of  the  thoughts  and  intents 
of  the  heart "  who  unrolls  the  volume  of  experience,  and  binds  times 
and  seasons  together,  and  therefore  the  Spirit  who  is  the  knitter  together 
of  hearts,  who  would  bind  us  into  one  family,  and  lead  us  into  the  know- 
ledge and  enjoyment  of  the  divine  and  ineffable  Unity,  seems  to  us  a 
spirit  of  division,  who  enters  our  minds  that  he  may  exalt  us  in  our  own 
conceits;  may  lift  us  up  one  against  another,  may  make  us  heady,  high- 
minded,  ■  lovers  of  ourselves  more  than  lovers  of  God.' 


Note  on  Chap.  II.  Sect.  iv. 
When  I  speak  of  the  final  result  of  the'experiment  of  pure  Protestant- 
ism, it  must  be  distinctly  understood  that  I  do  not  suppose  those  who  are 
called  Protestants  in  Germany,  in  Holland,  in  Switzerland,  to  have  lost 
the  blessings  which  they  possessed  before  the  Reformation,  or  those  which 
were  claimed  for  them  then.    I  mean  merely,  that  the  systems  called  Lu- 
theranism,  Calvinism,  Zuinglianism,  have  had  their  day,  and  that  the  time 
of  their  extinction  is  at  hand.    No  persons  are  more  alive  to  this  fact  than 
Germans.    Hence  their  eagerness  to  consolidate  the  professors  of  these 
systems  into  an  'Evangelical  Church;'  hence  their  desire  to  reconcile  the 
ideas  of  the  Eucharist  prevailing  among  the  Lutherans  and  the  '  Reform- 
ed,' by  mutual  concessions;  hence  their  willingness  to  tolerate,  for  a  time, 
subjection  to  the  State,  if  it  will  but  deliver  them  from  a  sectarian  posi- 
tion.   The  existence  of  such  feelings  must  be  a  sufficient  proof  to  all  who 
are  not  themselves  spell-bound  by  some  system,  that  the  descendants  of 
the  Reformers  are  not  deserted  by  the  Head  of  the  Church,  and  that  He 
maybe  preparing  for  them  blessings  which  the  great  men  of  the  sixteenth 
century  sighed  for,  but  were  unable  to  attain.    I  will  not  anticipate  the 
latter  portion  of  my  book  by  explaining  what  these  blessings  are,  or  how 
they  may  operate  as  a  cure  for  the  evils  under  which  Germany  was  groan- 
ing long  before  the  Reformers  arose  to  help  her  and  purify  her.    Still  less 
will  I  enter  upon  the  practical  question,  by  what  means  these  blessings 
may  be  recovered.    One  thing  is  clear:  those  who  think  and  feel  the  un- 
fortunate ecclesiastical  position  of  Protestant  Germany,  are  also  the  most 
determined  not  to  abandon  the  principles  of  the  Reformation.  Some  who 
may  have  been  affected  by  Austrian  or  Bavarian  influences  may  dream  of 
recovering  the  position  in  which  they  were  before  Luther  appeared ;  but 
all  men  who  are  really  in  earnest,  and  who  know  what  they  mean,  will 
repel  such  a  thought  as  at  once  a  folly  and  a  sin.    The  idea  that  there 
must  be  a  progress  and  not  a  retrogression  is  one  which  the  German  mind 
is  full  of,  and  which  I  should  be  very  sorry  to  drive  out  of  it.    The  only 


592 


NOTES. 


question  is,  about  the  nature  of  the  progress.  Beginning  in  the  spirit,  the 
Reformation  has,  in  the  most  grievous  sense,  been  made  perfect  in  the 
flesh.  Its  principles  have  found  no  clothing  but  one  of  system,  which  has 
stifled  them ;  or  one  of  a  state  organization,  which  stifles  the  minds  and 
energies  of  those  who  profess  them.  The  progress  Protestants  should 
desire  is  surely  one  towards  an  organization,  which  shall  not  be  an  arti- 
ficial but  a  vital  expression  of  that  which  is  the  faith  of  the  nation.  If  it 
should  be  found  that  the  ecclesiastical  organization  which  Germany  once 
possessed,  though  corrupted  and  deadened  by  the  denial  of  Christ's  direct 
superintendence  over  it,  is  of  this  vital  character,  the  recovery  of  it  will 
not  be  less  a  growth  than  the  acquisition  of  some  newer  one  would  be. 
Nay,  it  will  be  lar  more  a  growth;  for  the  one  will  belong  to  the  proper 
history  of  the  land ;  the  other  will  be  some  fantastic  dress,  fashioned  like 
the  institutions  of  Napoleon,  according  to  the  maxims  of  an  age,  and 
therefore  an  intolerable  burden  to  all  who  look  beyond  it,  and  feel  they 
have  a  portion  in  their  fathers  and  in  their  posterity.  Their  Protestant- 
ism will  make  the  old  Catholicism  new  and  living;  the  Catholicism  which 
possesses  this  quickening  element  will,  by  degrees,  extinguish  the  Ro- 
manist counterfeit  of  it ;  the  States,  which  no  civil  arrangements  have 
been  able  to  consolidate,  will  become  one  through  their  unity  of  faith,  and 
the  words  of  the  poet  will  be  fulfilled,  that  wherever  his  tongue  is  spoken, 
and  God  in  Heaven  praised  in  it,  there  the  German  will  find  his  father- 
land. 


Note  on  the  Athanasian  Creed. 

As  I  have  spoken  in  my  article  upon  Creeds  only  of  two,  it  may  be 
supposed  by  the  reader,  that  I  have  some  reason  for  objecting  to  the  third. 
Had  I  felt  such  objections  I  should  have  stated  them  openly,  and  not  left 
them  to  be  discovered  by  inference.  There  would  be  little  courage  in  ac- 
knowledging them.  The  number  of  those  who  reject  this  Creed  may  not 
be  so  great  as  it  was  in  the  last  century,  but  it  is  still  large,  and  com- 
posed of  persons  respectable  for  their  learning,  their  piety,  and  their  in- 
fluence. Those  who  are  most  strong  in  defending  it  will  find  so  much 
fault  with  my  opinions  on  other  subjects,  that  I  should  not  be  at  all  likely  to 
conciliate  them,  by  professing  an  agreement  with  them  upon  this. 

I  omitted  to  speak  of  the  Athanasian  Creed,  merely  because  it  did  not 
concern  the  subject  I  was  treating  of.  Its  formula  is  not,  '  I  believe,'  but 
'  Quicunque  vult.'  It  has  never  been  connected  with  Baptism.  It  has 
never  been  used  except  as  an  occasional  service  in  any  Church  ;  its  an- 
tiquity, though  venerable,  is  certainly  below  that  of  others.  Evidently, 
therefore,  its  merits  or  its  defects  stand  upon  a  different  ground  from  theirs. 


NOTES. 


593 


I  will  now  endeavour  to  explain  why  the  ordinary  objections  to  it  seem  to 
me  of  little  weight,  and  wherein  I  believe  its  value  consists. 

The  complaints  against  this  Creed  are  chiefly  two.  1.  That  it  i3  not 
consistent  with  the  Nicene,  which  asserts  so  clearly  the  idea  of  filial  sub- 
ordination. 2.  That  it  is  at  direct  variance  with  the  command,  '  Judge 
not  that  ye  be  not  judged.'  If  I  believed  either  of  these  allegations  to  be 
true,  the  authority  of  no  Church  upon  earth  could  induce  me  to  use  this 
formulary.  But  the  more  I  have  considered  them,  the  less  reason  have 
I  found  in  either  of  them. 

1.  The  passage  in  the  Athanasian  Creed,  which  seems  to  some  to  in- 
terfere with  the  doctrine  of  the  Nicene,  is  that  in  which  it  is  affirmed  that 
Christ  is  equal  to  the  Father  as  touching  his  Godhead,  inferior  to  the 
Father  as  touching  his  Manhood.  Here  we  are  told,  'it  is  signified,  that 
the  subordination  of  the  Son  to  the  Father  is  connected  with  his  human 
nature.  Whereas,  according  to  the  doctrine  of  the  other  Creed,  which 
Bishop  Bull  has  so  finely  developed,  the  subjection  which  was  manifested 
in  our  Lord's  acts  when  upon  earth,  was  really  involved  in  the  very  idea 
of  his  Being;  that  flesh  which  He  took  could  not  in  any  sense  change  the 
law  of  his  existence,  but  was  the  medium  through  which  it  was  shown 
forth.'  I  cannot  doubt  the  truth  of  these  remarks.  The  words,  i  Not  I, 
but  the  Father,'  seem  to  me  to  be  the  key  to  the  mystery  of  our  Lord's 
self-sacrifice,  that  is  to  say,  of  his  innermost  life ;  how,  then,  can  I  think 
them  other  than  the  expression  of  his  own  very  Personality?  But  it  is 
implied  in  what  I  have  said  that  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead  was  in  the 
man  Christ,  that  He  was  the  perfect  God.  The  very  objection  which 
we  are  considering  rests  upon  the  ground,  that  our  Lord's  acts,  as  a  man, 
would  not  be  a  complete  exhibition  of  himself,  if  we  might  regard  them  as 
only  belonging  to  his  assumed  nature.  But,  if  this  be  the  case, — if  we 
need  to  express  two  truths,  one,  the  perfect  and  complete  Godhead  of  our 
Lord  ;  one,  his  subordination  as  a  Son  to  the  Father  ;  each  necessary  to 
the  other,  each  practically  unmeaning  without  the  other ;  why  may  we  not 
look  at  the  union  of  humanity  to  the  Divinity,  as  that  which  supplies  us 
with  the  language  for  both  ?  The  idea  of  subordination  apart  from  all 
inequality,  exists  in  the  very  nature  of  the  Godhead;  it  is  brought  out 
and  expressed  through  the  inferiority  of  Manhood  to  Godhead.  The 
Sonship  of  Christ  is  the  type  and  ground  of  the  relation  in  which  t  he  hu- 
man stands  to  the  divine.  What  then  more  complete  and  beautiful  than 
the  language  of  the  Old  Church  upon  this  subject? 

Do  we  not  feel  that  if  we  had  only  the  Nicene  Creed, — if  a  new  heresy 
had  not  called  forth  another  exposition, — we  should  have  been  in  great 
danger  of  losing  our  apprehension  of  a  truth,  from  having  but  one  imper- 
fect form  of  language  to  unfold  it  in?  Nay,  do  we  not  feel  that  as  the 
Apostles'  Creed,  without  the  Nicene,  would  lead  us  into  the  danger  of  think- 
ing only  concerning  the  relation  in  which  the  Divine  Being  stands  to  its  ; 
so  the  Nicene  Creed  without  the  Athanasian,  would  still  lead  us  to  think 


594 


NOTES. 


merely  of  divine  relations,  without  remembering  that  there  is  an  absolute 
ground  visible  in  them  and  through  them  ? 

2.  But  the  charge  of  uncharitableness  is  one  which  is  far  more  popular 
and  intelligible  than  that  of  which  I  have  been  speaking  ;  perhaps  there- 
fore, I  may  venture  to  meet  it  in  a  popular  way.  We  are  commonly 
asked  such  a  question  as  this  :  'Though  you  may  be  able  to  explain  away 
these  clauses  by  ingenious  sophisms  in  your  study,  do  you  not  feel  when 
you  are  reading  the  Creed  in  your  Church  to  the  people,  that  you  arenot  ut- 
tering the  kind  of  words  which  you  would  wish  to  utter,  or  acting  in  the  kind 
of  spirit  in  which  you  would  wish  to  act,  when  you  read  the  seventh  chap- 
ter of  St.  Matthew's  Gaspel,  or  the  thirteenth  chapter  of  the  first  epistle 
to  the  Corinthians?'  I  can  only  answer  this  question  for  myself ;  but  I 
doubt  not  there  are  hundreds  who  can  say,  with  a  perfectly  clear  con- 
science, what  I  say  now.  To  the  best  of  my  knowledge  and  recollection, 
I  never  have  felt  tempted  while  reading  this  creed,  however  I  may  have 
felt  tempted  at  other  times,  tn  indulge  one  hard  thought  about  the  state 
of  any  man  who  is  living  now  or  has  lived  in  former  times.  I  do  not  think 
that  the  creed  calls  upon  me  to  do  this  ;  nay,  I  think  that  its  awful  lan- 
guage forbids  me  to  do  it.  I  dare  not  ask  myself  who  has  committed  the 
fearful  sin,  of '  confounding  the  Persons  and  dividing  the  Substance,'  which 
it  denounces.  It  may  not  be  the  man  who  has  used  the  most  confused 
and  heretical  forms  of  expression  ;  it  may  not  be  the  man  who  has  even 
seemed  to  the  Church  to  be  most  self-willed  and  refractory ;  it  may  be 
the  man  who  is  resting  most  contentedly  in  his  orthodoxy ;  it  may  be  my- 
self. Nay,  have  I  not  a  witness  within,  that  every  wrong  act  which  I 
have  done,  or  wrong  thought  which  I  have  cherished,  so  far  as  it  has  di- 
minished my  sense  of  the  distinction  between  truth  and  falsehood,  right 
and  wrong,  has  been  of  the  nature  of  that  sin  which  I  describe  by  the 
words  '  Confounding  the  Persons,'  and  has  brought  me  into  the  danger  of 
committing  it ;  that  every  self-willed,  unkind,  schismatical  act  or  thought 
has  been  of  the  nature  of  that  sin  which  I  describe  by  the  words  '  Dividing 
the  Substance,5  and  has  tended  to  bring  me  into  it?  For  this  creed  takes 
me  into  another  iegion  altogether  from  that  of  words  and  names  and 
forms  of  the  intellect,  though  it  makes  use  of  those  words  and  names  and 
forms,  for  the  sake  of  correcting  the  abuses  which  they  have  produced, 
and  as  signs  which  may  show  me  my  way  to  deeper  truths  and  principles. 
It  is  my  own  fault  if  I  stay  in  the  outer  region,  and  do  not  let  the  Church 
guide  me  into  its  inner  circle  ;  it  is  my  own  fault  if  I  do  not  warn  others 
and  warn  myself,  of  the  connexion  between  eternal  truths  and  principles, 
and  that ;  doing  good'  or  '  doing  evil,'  to  which,  as  the  creed  declares  in 
its  last  articles,  eternal  life  or  punishment  are  appended. 

But  why  do  I  wish  to  retain  this  creed,  seeing  that  some  may  use  it 
amiss  for  the  condemnation  of  their  neighbours,  and  not  for  good  to  them 
or  to  themselves?  I  answer,  that  if  I  parted  with  it,  I  think  I  should  not 
help  the  cause  of  charity,  and  should  do  great  injury  to  the  cause  of  truth. 


NOTES. 


595 


The  language  of  the  Old  Church  may  sound  stronger  and  fiercer  than 
that  which  is  common  in  our  day,  but  it  is  grounded  upon  the  words, 
'  This  is  life  eternal,  that  they  may  know  Thee  the  only  true  God.'  The 
bottomless  pit  which  the  fathers  really  dreaded  was  that  of  Atheism,  the 
state  of  the  human  spirit  left  without  God.  I  believe  the  more  we  return 
to  this  idea  the  more  of  inward  charity  we  shall  have,  the  more  we  shall 
understand  our  glory  and  our  perils,  the  more  we  shall  have,  of  common 
hopes  and  common  objects  ;  the  more  we  shall  be  free  from  vulgar  sel- 
fish desires,  and  from  superstitious  fears.  I  could  not  give  up  this  creed 
without  saying,  that  the  meaning  and  principle  of  it  belonged  less  to  this 
time  than  to  former  times.  Whereas,  I  believe  that  they  belong  more 
to  our  time  than  to  any  time.  For  this,  it  seems  to  me,  is  the  question 
which  is  in  debate  now.  Are  we  to  behold  the  unity  which  has  its  deep- 
est and  most  real  ground  in  that  name  of  God  which  this  creed  speaks 
of  informing  all  society  and  all  nature  ;  or  are  we  to  see  every  thing  bro 
ken,  dvided,  unharmonized ;  a  dark  form  of  self-love,  embodied  in  some 
visible  tyranny,  above  us,  and  a  gulf  of  utter  nothingness  beneath  us? 


THE  END. 


IVEW  WORKS  AAD  1VEW  EDITIONS 


OP 

ESTABLISHED)  EPISCOPAL  80®l$, 

PUBLISHED  BY 

D.  APPLETON  &  CO.,  NEW-YORK: 

AND 

GEO.  S.  APPLETON,  PHILADELPHIA. 


Just  Ready, 

PAROCHIAL  SERMON'S, 

BY  JOHN  HENRY  NEWMAN,  B.  D. 
Fellow  of  Oriel  College  and  Vio  ir  of  St.  Mary  the  Virgin's,  Oxford.    The  six  vol- 
umes of  London  edition  complete  in  two  elegant  8vo  volumes  of  upwards  of  600 
pages  each,  $5  00 

*.*  Mr.  Newman's  Sermons  have  probably  attain ed  a  higher  character  than  any  others  ever 
published  in  this  country.  The  following  recommendatory  letters  from  the  several  distinguish- 
ed Divines  whose  names  are  affixed,  illustrate  their  importance. 

From  the  Bishop  of  New- York. 
It  gives  me  great  pleasure  to  hear  of  your  design  to  publish  an  American  edition  of  the  Rev. 
John  Henry  Newman's  Parochial  Sermons.  From  a  partial  acquaintance  with  them  by  my 
own  perusal,  and  a  knowledge  of  the  opinion  entertaitied  of  them  by  brethren  in  whose  correct 
views  and  sound  judgment  I  have  the  fullest  confidence,  I  have  no  hesitation  in  regarding 
these  sermons  as  eminently  calculated  to  promote  the  knowledge  and  practice  of  genuine  evan- 
gelical religion. 

I  have  long,  gentlemen,  cherished  a  grateful  sense  of  the  obligation  under  which  all  true 
friends  of  that  religion  lie  to  you  for  the  great  good  which  your  press  has  done  to  its  cause.  I 
cordially  commend  ihe  present  enterprise  as  worthy  of  all  patronage,  and  would  be  glad  to  have 
these  volumes  of  sermons  in  the  possesion  of  every  family  in  my  diocese.  For  simplicity  and 
godly  sincerity,  for  humble  and  child-like  reliance  on  the  word  of  God,  and  for  close,  pointed, 
and  uncompromising  presentation  of  the  truths  and  duties  of  the  Gospel,  I  know  not  their  su- 
periors ;  nor  their  equals,  except  it  be  in  the  well  known  and  generally  approved  "Plain  Ser- 
mons, by  Contributors  to  the  Tracts  for  the  Times." 

To  all  then  who  love  the  Gospel,  and  desire  true  instruction  therein,  I  unhesitatingly  com- 
mend Newman's  Parochial  Sermons. 

Wishing  you  success  in  the  truly  good  work  to  which  your  press  is  so  largely  contributing, 
I  have  the  honor  to  be,  gentlemen,  with  great  respect, 

Yours  very  truly, 

New- York,  Dec.  7,  1S42.  Benj.  T.  Onderdonk. 

From  the  Bishop  of  New  Jersey. 
I  highly  approve  your  proposal  to  reprint  Mr.  Newman's  admirable  Parochial  Sermons,  and 
desire  for  them  the  most  extended  circulation.  Much  as  I  have  been  gratified  by  your  repub- 
I  cation  of  many  excellent  books,  the  heirlooms  which  the  Church  of  England  has  derived  from 
ancient  piety,  and  learning,  or  the  production  of  the  vigorous  minds  and  fervent  hearts  that  now 
adorn  while  they  defend  her  altars,  I  have  looked  and  longed  for  an  edition  of  these  sermons, 
as  your  noblest  contribution  to  the  sacred  literature  of  the  times.  Mr.  Newman's  Sermons  are 
of  an  order  by  themselves  There  is  a  naturalness,  a  pressure  towards  the  point  proposed,  an 
ever  salient  freshness,  about  them,  which  will  attract  a  class  of  readers,  to  whom  sermons  are  not 
ordinarily  attractive.  Again,  they  are  of  a  wonderful  comprehension.  While  they  are  ».t 
above  the  level  of  the  plainest  readers,  they  will  interest  and  satisfy  the  highest  and  most  ac- 
complished minds.  With  the  most  intellectual  persons,  they  will  win  their  way,  1  am  sure,  as 
no  m  idem  productions  of  this  sort  have  done  But  all  these  are  but  incidentals  to  their  ster- 
ling and  imperishable  worth,  as  expositions  of  the  truth  of  Holy  Scripture,  and  exhortations  to 
the  duties  of  the  Christian  life,  urged  to  the  heart  with  an  earnestness  and  unction  scarcely 
paralleled  ;  abvove  all,  carrying  with  them  a  force  beyond  all  argument,  beyond  all  eloquence, 
in  the  living  power  of  holiness  with  which  they  are  instinct,  to  rouse  the  careless,  to  steady  the 
wavering,  to  sober  the  worldly,  to  animate  and  elevate  the  humble  seeker  of  the  kingd  >m  of 
God  and  its  righteousness,  and  to  imbue  the  age  with,  what  it  needs  the  most,  humility  and 
heavenly-mindedness.  I  shall  welcome  your  proposed  volumes  as  powerful  auxiliaries  to  my 
exertions  to  set  forth  the  Gospel  in  the  Church  :  and  devoutly  pray  that  God  may  bless  them  to 
the  edification  of  many  souls,  and  to  the  advancement  of  the  pure  and  peaceful  kingdom  of  His 
blessed  Son. 

Bidding  you  "God  speed"  in  your  career  of  useful  and  most  honorable  enterprise,  I  am 
faithfully  your  friend, 

Riverside,  St.  Andrew's  Day,  1842.  G.  W.  Doane. 

From  the  Bishop  of  North  Carolina. 

Raleigh,  Nov.  28,  1842. 

Your  letter  announcing  your  intention  to  republish  the  Parochial  Sermons  of  the  Rev. 
John  Henry  Newman,  B.  D  ,  Oxford,  has  given  me  sincere  pleasure.  In  compliance  with  your 
request  for  my  opinion  of  them,  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say, — after  a  constant  use  of  them  in  my 
closet,  and  an  observation  of  their  effect  upon  some  of  my  friends,  for  the  last  six  years, — that 
they  are  among  the  very  best  practical  sermons  in  the  English  language ;  that  while  they  are 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


free  from  those  extravagances  of  opinion  usually  ascribed  to  the  author  of  the  90th  Tract,  they 
assert  in  the  strongest  manner  the  true  doctrines  of  the  Reformation  in  England,  and  enforce 
with  peculiar  solemnity  and  effect  that  holiness  of  life,  with  the  means  thereto,  so  characteristic 
of  the  Fathers  of  that  trying  age. 

With  high  respect  and  esteem,  your  friend  and  servant, 

L.  S.  Ives. 

From  the  Bishop  of  Maryland. 

Dec.  17,  1842. 

I  am  glad  that  you  design  to  publish  Mr.  Newman's  Sermons.  The  portions  of  their  contents 
about  which  there  is  a  difference  of  opinion,  are  not  to  be  set  in  the  scale  against  the  general 
tendency  of  the  volumes. — Deeply  spiritual,  and  searching  the  reader' s  heart  with  no  ordinary 
insight  into  its  recesses,  they  cannot  fail  to  quicken  faith,  alarm  lukewarmness,  expose  hypoc- 
risy, detect  unbelief,  and  powerfully  stimulate  the  sinner  to  repentance  and  the  believer  to  re- 
newal and  increase  of  holiness.  Nowhere  have  I  seen  Christ  crucified,  yea,  rather  risen  again, 
set  forth  with  more  plainness.  By  no  practical  writings  have  I  been  more  strongly  moved  to 
loathing  of  sin,  and  utter  renunciation  of  self-dependence.  Man's  helplesness  and  the  all-suffi- 
ciency of  Christ,  are  nowhere  to  be  found  set  forth  with  greater  earnestness  of  enforcement 
and  variety  of  illustration. 

Very  respectfully  your  obedient  servant, 

W.  It.  Whittingham. 

From  the  Rev.  Dr.  Seabury  (editorial  notice  in  Churchman). 
We  are  pleased  ro  learn  that  D.  Appleton  &  Co.,  contemplate  the  republication  of  Mr.  New- 
man's Sermons.  The  English  copy  now  forms  six  volumes,  and  cannot  be  furnished  to  pur- 
chasers at  a  less  price  than  $3  a  volume.  The  American  copy,  if  published,  will  give  the  same 
amount  of  matter  in  two  volumes,  at  $2  50  a  volume  :  making  a  difference  of  13  dollars.  The 
wo  k  will  be  put  to  press  as  soon  as  a  sufficient  number  of  subscribers  are  obtained  to  indemnify 
the  publishers. — We  can  hardly  doubt  that  many  of  our  readers,  on  seeing  ths  notice,  will  hand 
in  their  names.  The  sermons  of  Mr.  Newman  have  already  in  this  country  produced  the  hap- 
piest effects,  and  we  have  long  and  often  desired  their  republication,  in  order  that  the  sphere  of 
their  influence  may  be  enlarged. 

Now  ready,  Second  Edition. 

THE  HISTORY  OF  THE  REFORMATION 

OF  THE  CHURCH  OF  ENGLAND.  By  Gilbert  Burnet,  D.  D.,  late  Lord  Bish- 
op of  Salisbury.  With  the  Collection  of  Records,  and  a  copious  Index,  revised  and 
corrected,  with  additional  Notes  and  a  Preface,  by  the  Rev.  E.  Nares,  D.  D.  Illus- 
trated with  a  Frontispiece  and  twenty-three  Portaits  on  steel.  Forming  four  elegant 
8vo  vols,  of  near  600  pages  each.    $8  00 

This  is  one  of  those  great  standard  works  for  which  the  publishers  have  especially  deserved 
the  thanks  of  ecclesiastical  students  and  of  general  scholars  throughout  the  land.  Oftentimes 
the  heart  of  the  lover  of  truth  and  true  intellectual  progress,  sinks  within  him  at  the  si^ht  of  the 
pernicious  trash  that  is  thrown  so  broadly  before  the  reading  public,  and  he  feels  it  impossible 
that,  under  this  influence,  the  public  taste  should  not  become  depraved,  the  public  morals  de- 
bauched, and  literature,  which  should  be  the  minister  of  purity  and  virtue,  made  the  engine  of 
all  corrupting  vice.  But  the  efforts,  crowned,  we  are  confident,  with  abundant  success,  of  some 
of  the  principal  publishing  houses  in  this  city  and  in  Philadelphia,  to  bring  out,  in  a  style  befit- 
ting their  worth,  the  rarer  standard  works  of  English  History  and  Theology,  give  ground  of  en- 
couragement and  hope.  To  the  student  either  of  civil  or  religious  history  no  epoch  can  be  of 
more  importance  than  that  of  the  Reformation  in  Engiand.  It  signalized  the  overthrow,  in  one 
of  its  str  ongest  holds,  of  the  Roman  power  and  gave  an  impulse  to  the  human  mind  the  full  re- 
sults of  which  are  even  now  but  partly  realized.  Almost  all  freedom  of  inquiry — all  toleration 
in  matters  of  religion,  had  its  birth-hour  then  ;  and  without  a  familiar  acquaintance  with  all  its 
principal  events,  but  little  progress  can  be  made  in  understanding  the  nature  and  ultimate  ten- 
dencies of  the  revolution  then  effected. 

The  History  of  Bishop  Burnet  is  one  of  the  most  celebrated  and  by  far  the  most  frequently 
quoted  of  any  that  has  been  written  of  this  great  event.  Upon  the  original  publication  of  the 
first  volume,  it  was  received  in  Great  Britain  with  the  loudest  and  most  extravagant  encomiums. 
The  author  received  the  thanks  of  both  Houses  of  Parliament,  and  was  requested  by  them  to 
continue  the  work.  In  continuing  it  he  had  the  assistance  of  the  most  learned  and  eminent  di- 
vines of  his  time  ;  and  he  confesses  his  indebtedness  for  important  aid  to  Lloyd,  Tillotson 
and  Stillingfleet,  three  of  the  greatest  of  England's  Bishops.  "  I  know,"  says  he,  in  his 
Preface  to  the  second  volume,  "that  nothing  can  more  effectually  recommend  this  work,  than 
to  say  that  it  passed  with  their  hearty  appr  obation,  after  they  had  examined  it  with  that  care 
which  their  great  zeal  for  the  cause  concerned  in  it,  and  their  goodness  to  the  author  and  free- 
dom with  him,  obliged  them  to  use.'' 

The  present  edition  of  this  great  work  has  been  edited  with  laborious  care  by  Dr.  Nares,  who 
professes  to  have  corrected  important  errors  into  which  the  author  fell,  and  to  have  made  such 
improvements  in  the  order  of  the  wcrk  as  will  render  it  far  more  useful  to  the  reader  or  histor- 
ical student.  Preliminary  explanations,  full  and  sufficient  to  the  clear  understanding  of  the  au- 
thor, are  given,  and  marginal  references  are  made  throughout  the  book,  so  as  greatly  to  facilitate 
and  render  accurate  its  consultation.  The  whole  is  published  in  four  large  octavo  volumes  of 
six  hundred  pages  in  each — printed  upon  heavy  paper  in  large  and  clear  type.  It  contains  por- 
traits of  twenty-four  of  the  most  celebrated  characters  of  the  Reformation,  and  is  issued  in  a 
very  neat  style.  It  will  of  course  find  a  place  in  every  theologian's  library — and  will,  by  no  means 
we  trust,  be  confined  to  that  comparatively  limited  sphere. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


PALMER'S  TREATISE  ON  THE  CHURCH. 

A  Treatise  on  the  Church  of  Christ.  Designed  chiefly  for  the  use  of  Students  in 
Theology.  By  the  Rev.  William  Palmer,  M.A.  of  Worcester  College,  Oxford. 
Edited  with  Notes,  by  the  Right  Rev.  W.  R.  Whittingham,  D.D.,  Bishop  of  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church  in  the  Diocese  of  Maryland.  Two  vols.  8vo., 
handsomely  printed  on  fine  paper.    $5  00. 

M  The  treatise  of  Mr.  Palmer,  is  the  best  exposition  and  vindication  of  Church  Principles  that  we 
hare  ever  read  ;  excelling-  contemporaneous  treatises  in  depth  of  learning  and  solidity  of  judgment, 
aa  much  as  it  excels  older  treatises  on  the  like  subjects,  in  adaptation  to  the  wants  and  habits  of  the 
age.  Of  its  influence  in  England,  where  it  has  passed  through  two  editions,  we  have  not  the  means 
to  form  an  opinion  ;  but  we  believe  that  in  this  country  it  has  already,  even  before  its  reprint,  done 
more  to  restore  the  sound  tone  of  Catholic  principles  and  feeling  than  any  other  one  work  of  the  age. 
The  author's  learning  and  powers  of  combination  and  arrangement,  great  as  they  obviously  are,  are 
less  remarkable  than  the  sterling  good  sense,  the  vigorous  and  solid  judgment,  which  is  every  where 
manifest  in  the  treatise,  and  confers  on  it  its  distinctive  excellence.  The  style  of  the  author  is  distin- 
guished for  dignity  and  masculine  energy,  while  his  tone  is  everywhere  natural  ;  on  proper  occasions, 
reverential  ;  and  always,  so  far  as  we  remember,  sufficiently  conciliatory. 

M  To  our  clergy  and  intelligent  laity  who  desire  to  see  the  Church  justly  discriminated  from  Ro- 
manists on  the  one  hand,  and  dissenting  denominations  on  the  othei,  we  earnestly  commend  Palmer'* 
Treatise  on  the  Church." — N.  Y.  Churchman. 

"  This  able,  elaborate,  and  learned  vindication  of  the  claim  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  to  be  consider  the  true 
Catholic  Church,  and  the  exposure  which  is  here  made  of  the  grounds  of  difference  between  it  and  the  Romish  Church,  and  of 
•he  baseless  pretensions  of  that  church  lo  be  the  '  one  Holy  Catholic,  and  Apostolic  Church,'  will  assuredly  commend  these  vol- 
umes to  the  favour  of  Churchmen. 

"  At  a  moment  when  Popery  aa  it  well  expressed  in  the  American  Editor's  preface,  isspreading  among  ug  bv  '  the  aid  mainly 
of  imported  men,  money,  and  members,'  it  is  well,  by  a  true  relation  of  what  Popery  really  if,  to  put  the  nation  on  guard 
against  its  encroachments.  This  service  is  done  by  this  treatise,  of  which  it  were  recommendation  enough  to  say,  that  its  re- 
publication has  engaged  the  labours  and  time  of,  and  is  commended  to  the  use  of  theological  student  by,  certainly  not  the  least 
learned,  pious,  andexemplary  of  our  American  Bishops.  The  publishers  deserve  a  full  share  of  commendation  for  the  handsome 
■tanner  in  which  Uiey  have  sent  forth  these  volumes."  —  N.  Y.  American. 

MAGEE  ON  ATONEMENT  AND  SACRIFICE. 

Discourses  and  Dissertations  on  the  Scriptural  Doctrines  of  Atonement  and  Sacrifice, 
and  on  the  Principal  Arguments  advanced,  and  the  Mode  of  Reasoning  employed 
by  the  Opponents  of  those  Doctrines,  as  held  by  the  Established  Church.  By  the 
late  most  Rev.  William  M'Gee,  D.D.,  Archbishop  of  Dublin.  Two  vols,  royal  8vo. 
beautifully  printed.    $5  00. 

K  This  is  one  of  the  ablest  critical  and  polemical  works  of  modern  times.  Archbishop  Magee  is  truly  a  maleus  hereticolinn. 
He  is  an  excellent  scholar,  an  acute  reasoner,  and  is  possessed  of  a  most  extensive  acquaintance  with  the  wide  field  of  argu- 
ment to  which  his  volumes  are  devoted— the  profound  Biblical  information  en  a  variety  of  topics  which  the  Archbishop  brings 
forward,  must  endear  his  name  to  all  lovers  of  Christianity." — Ortne. 

HARE'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS. 

Sermons  to  a  Country  Congregation.  By  Augustus  William  Hare,  A.M.,  late  Fel- 
low of  New  College,  and  Rector  of  Alton  Barnes.  One  vol.  royal  8vo.    $2  25. 

"Any  one  who  can  be  pleased  with  delicacy  of  thought  expressed  in  the  most  6imple  language — any  one  who  can  feel  the 
charm  of  finding  practical  duties  elucidated  and  enforced  by  apt  and  varied  illustrations — will  be  delighted  with  this  volume, 
which  presents  us  with  the  workings  of  a  pious  and  highly-gifted  mind."—  Quar.  ittvieio. 

A  MANUAL  FOR  COMMUNICANTS; 

Or  the  Order  for  Administering  the  Holy  Communion ;  conveniently  arranged  with 
Meditations  and  Prayers  from  Old  English  Divines,  being  the  Eucharistica  of  Sam- 
uel Wilberforce,  M.A.,  Archdeacon  of  Surry,  (adapted  to  the  American  service.) 
Convenient  size  for  the  pocket.    $37 |. 

M  The  order  of  this  work  is  as  follows  :— first,  "  The  Exhortation  :"  comprising  the  two  exhortations  which  are  inserted  is 
Ihe  Communion  Office  ;  then  the  "  Ante-Communion  ;"  next,  "  The  Canon  of  the  Holy  communion  ;  beginning  with  the. 
Offertory  and  ending  with  the  Form  of  administei  ing  the  elements  ;  and  lastly,  the  Post  Communion.  This  pan  of  the  work  w 
the  Communion  Office  as  contained  in  the  Prayer  Book,  slightly  altered  in  its  arrangement,  and  accompanied  with  a  few  short 
fcvotional  meditations  in  the  margin.  After  this  is  the  Introduction  by  Archdeacon "Wilberiorce,  chiefly  on  the  importance  of 
attendance  at  the  Lord's  Table,  and  the  causos  ol  the  present  neglect  ot  the  privilege. 

We  have  next  a  br.tf  notice  of  the  writers  from  whose  works  nre  taken  the  extracts  which  form  the  body  of  the  volume.  These 
are  Colet,  Cruumer,  Jewel,  Hooker.  Andrews.  .Sutton,  Laud,  Hall,  Hammond,  Ti.ylor,  I.eighion,  Brevint,  Patrick,  Addisou, 
Ken, Sparrow,  tieverid^e,  Hickes,  Comber,  Kettlewell,  Wilson,  and  Potter;  whose  names  are  arranged  in  chronological  order, 
with  a  mention  in  few  lines  of  their  lives  and  characters.  The  remaiu.ier  of  the  work  is  divided  into  three  parts  ;  ot  which  the 
first  consists  ot  Meditations  on  the  Holy  Communion  ;  the  second  of  Prayers  before  and  after  Communion  |  to  which  are  added, 
Bishop  Wilson's  Meditations  on  Sell  ct  Passage.",  and  Hi.-hop  Patrick's  Prayer  lor  one  who  cannot  publicly  communicate  ;  auO 
the  third  of  select  passage*  explanatory  of  the  Holy  .Sacrament  and  the  benefits  of  its  worthy  reception. 

These  meditations,  prayers  and  expositions,  are  given  in  the  very  words  of  ihe  illustrious  divines  above  mentioned,  marly™, 
eoufetsors  and  doctors  of  the  Chorea  ;  and  they  form  altogether  such  a  body  of  instructive  matter  aa  is  nowhere  else  lo  be  found 
in  the  same  compass.  Though  collected  from  \arious  authors,  the  whole  is  pervaded  by  a  unity  of  spirit  and  purpose  ;  and  we 
most  earnestly  commend  the  work  as  better  fitted  than  any  other  which  we  know,  tosubserve  the  ends  of  sound  edification  and 
fervent  and  substantial  devotion.  The  American  reprint  has  been  edited  by  a  deacon  of  peat  promise  in  the  Church,  and  Is 
appropriately  deuicaied  to  the  rJishop  of  tius  diocese."—  Churchman. 


Divinity y  Theology \  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 

CHURCHMAN'S  LIBRARY. 

The  volumes  of  this  Standard  Series  are  printed  on  the  finest  paper,  elegantly  ornamented,  av_ 
bound  in  a  superior  manner,  and  uniform  in  size.  Bishop  Doane  says  of  this  collection,  "  I  write  to 
express  my  thanks  to  you  for  reprints  of  the  Oxford  Books  ;  first,  for  such  books,  and  secondly,  in  such 
a  «'.yle.  I  sincerely  hope  you  may  be  encouraged  to  go  on,  and  give  them  all  to  us.  You  will  dignify 
the  art  of  printing,  and  you  will  do  great  service  to  the  best  interest  of  the  country."  In  a  letter 
received  from  Bishop  Whittingham,  he  says,  "  I  had  forgotten  to  state  my  very  great  satisfaction  at 
your  commencement  of  a  series  of  Devotional  Works,  lately  republished  in  Oxford."  The  Publishers 
beg  to  state  while  in  so  short  a  time  this  Library  has  increased  to  so  many  volumes,  they  are  encour- 
aged to  make  yet  larger  additions,  and  earnestly  hope  it  may  receive  all  the  encouragement  it  deserves. 

The  following  Volumes  have  already  appeared  : — 

THE   EARLY   ENGLISH  CHURCH. 

Or  Christian  History  of  England  in  early  British,  Saxon  and  Norman  Times.  By 
the  Rev.  Edward  Churton,  M.  A.  With  a  Preface,  by  the  Right  Rev.  Bishop 
Ives.    1  vol.  lGmo.  elegantly  ornamented.    $1  00. 

**  The  following'  delightful  pages  place  before  us  gome  of  the  choicest  examples — both  clerical  and  lay — <S  the  iruo 
Christian  spirit,  m  the  E  ARLY  ENGLISH  CHURCH.  In  truth,  these  pages  are  crowded  with  weighty  lessons.  Here 
our  laity  will  find  that  these  noble  foundations  of  charity  in  the  mother  coantry— the  existence  of  which  they  nave  been 
accustomed  to  ascribe  to  the  credulity  of  ignorance,  or  the  fears  of  superstition,  successfully  practised  upon  t.y  the  arts 
of  priests,  had  a  higher  and  holier  origin— that  they  sprung  into  being  under  the  warm  impulses  of  that  divine  an'.'  ex- 
pansive benevolence  of  which  the  constraining  power  ol  Christ's  love  made  his  early  followers  such  large  partakers  at  luri 
period  while  yet  Christian  men  fully  recognised  their  high  vocations,  as  '  stewards  of  the  manifold  gifts  ot  God,'  —lived 
under  the  abiding  coiiTiction,  that  we  are  not  our  own,  but  that,  'bought  with  the  precious  blood  of  Christ,'  we  art 
'  bound  to  glorify  him  in  our  bodies  and  our  spirits,  which  are  his.'  Here,  too,  our  clergy  may  learn  a  lesson  of  true  self- 
devotion  to  their  Master — may  see,  strikingly  and  beautifully  illustrated,  that  love  for  Christ,  and  that  teal  for  his  king- 
dom, which  alone  can  bear  us  tranquilly  and  successfully  through  the  labours  and  trials  of  the  holy  ministry— may  see  the 
operation  of  the  true  missionary  spirit — the  spirit  of  endurance  and  self-sacrifice,  which  shrinks  from  no  obstacles  when 
the  salvation  of  sinners  is  to  be  achieved  under  the  command  and  the  promise  of  the  Almighty  God— may  see,  in  short, 
an  impressive  and  instructive  exemplification  of  that  child-like  submission  to  God,  that  pure  and  simple  trust  in  him, 
which,  at  his  bidding,  performs  duty,  and  leaves  the  result  to  his  providence  and  grace. 

"But,  to  read  these  pages  with  profit,  we  must  pray  to  God  for  a  portion  of  that  spirit  which  indited  them,  and  which 
so  manifestly  control  the  events  which  they  record — must  read  them  with  a  spiritual  eye  ;  with  an  eye  intent  upon  discov- 
ering— not  that  which  may  help  to  sustain  some  preconceived  notion,  but  that  which,  prompted  by  the  gpirii  <>l  Christ, 
and  accomplished  through  the  power  of  his  saving  truth,  exhibits  to  us  some  great  principle  of  C  ristian  act  ton,  and  m>um 
powerful  motive  t  'go  and  do  likewise.'" — Vide  Preface. 

LEARN  TO  DIE. 

Disce  Mori,  Learn  to  Die :  a  Religious  Discourse,  moving  every  Christian  man  to 
enter  into  a  serious  Remembrance  of  his  End.  By  Christopher  Sutton,  D.  D.,  late 
Prebend  of  Westminster.    1  vol.  16mo.,  elegantly  ornamented.    $1  09. 

"  Of  the  three  works  of  this  excellent  author  lately  reprinted  in  England,  the  '  Disce  Mori '  is,  in  our  judgment,  decid 
eilly  the  best.  It  was  the  favourite  boc  k  of  the  Bishop  of  Joly,  who,  (the  touching  incident  cannot  be  forgotten,!  died 
with  it  in  his  hands.  It  was  this  fact,  we  belie ve,  wnich  first  recalled  the  book  from  the  oblivion  into  vvlnrli  it  haj 
falUn  ;  anil  our  readers  may  remember,  that  shortly  after  its  republication  in  England,  we  urged  an  American  reprint, 
on  the  ground  that  it  was  a  book  which  would  prove  universally  acceptable  to  the  Church.  Such  is  villi  our  opinion  ; 
we  do  not  believe  that  a  single  journal  or  clergyman  in  the  Church  will  be  found  to  say  a  word  in  its  disparagement  J 
but  that,  on  the  contrary,  all  will  unite  in  commending  it  as  one  of  the  very  best  of  our  practical  works,  equally  devo- 
tional and  almost  equally  rich  with  the  similar  work  ot  Tavlor,  and  free  from  those  leatures  with  which  Taylor  (turtle! 
such  weak  minds  as  have  a  morbid  dread  of  Romanism.  Our  columns  have  been,  and  now  that  the  book  is  reprinted, 
will  again  be,  enriched  with  extracts  which  will  make  the  '  Disce  Mori '  favourably  known  to  our  readers.  "—  CAu; •c/tfjian. 

MEDITATIONS  ON  THE  SACRAMENT. 

Godly  Meditations  upon  the  most  Holy  Sacrament  of  the  Lord's  Supper.  By  Chris- 
topher Sutton,  D.  D.,  late  Prebend  of  Westminster.  1  vol.  royal  16mo.  elegantly 
ornamented.    $1  00. 

"  We  announced  in  our  last  number  the  republication  in  this  country,  of  Sutton's  '  Meditations  on  the  Lord's  Supper* 
and  having  since  read  the  work,  are  prepared  to  recommend  it  warmly  and  without  qualification  to  the  perusal  of  our 
readers.  It  is  purely  practical ;  the  doctrine  of  the  Eucharist  being  touched  upon  only  in  solar  as  was  necessary  to 
guard  against  error.  Its  standard  of  piety  is  very  high,  and  the  helps  which  it  affords  to  a  devout  participation  of  the 
holy  sacrament  of  which  it  treats,  should  make  it  the  inseparable  companion  of  every  communicant.  We  know  indeed 
of  no  work  on  the  subject  that  can  in  all  respects  be  compared  with  it ;  and  for  its  agency  in  promoting  that  advancement 
in  holiness  after  whicn  every  Christian  should  strive,  have  no  hesitation  in  classing  it  with  the  Treatise  on  '  Holy  Living 
and  Dying  '  of  Bishop  Taylor,  and  the  '  Sacra  Privata  '  of  Bishop  Wilson.  The  penod  at  which  the  book  was  written 
wdl  account  for,  and  excuse,  what  in  the  present  age  would  be  regarded  as  defects  of  style  ;  but  are  fewer  than 

might  have  been  expected,  and  are  soon  lost  sight  of  in  the  contemplation  of  the  many  and  great  txcoilencics  with  which 
it  abounds.  The  publishers  have  done  good  service  to  the  country  in  the  publication  of  this  work,  winch  is  a  beautiful 
reprint  of  the  Oxford  edition,  and  we  are  glad  to  learn  that  it  will  be  speedily  followed  by  the  '  Disce  Viverc  '  and  '  Disce 
Hot-i '  of  the  same  author."— Bonner  o/lA#  Cross. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


A  DISCOURSE  CONCERNING  PRAYER, 

And  the  frequenting  Daily  Public  Prayers.    By  Symon  Patrick,  D.  D.,  sometime 
Lord  Bishop  of  Ely.    Edited  by  Francis  E.  Paget,  M.  A.,  Chaplain  to  the  Lord 
Bishop  of  Oxford.    1  vol.  royal  16mo.  elegantly  ornamented.    $0  75. 
"  This  work  treats  of  the  nature  and  necessity  of  prayer,  of  the  sense  of  all  niaukind  about  this 
matter,  especially  of  our  blessed  Saviour,  of  the  honour  done  us  by  God  in  admitting'  us  into  his  pre- 
teuce,  and  of  the  great  benefits  we  receive  by  it.    It  shows  that  public  prayer  is  the  most  necessary 
etf  all.  that  God  is  most  honoured  by  it,  that  it  is  most  advantageous  to  us,  and  most  suitable  to  the 
nature  of  man,  that  the  nature  of  a  Church  requires  it,  that  our  Saviour  has  taught  the  doctria*, 
which  is  confirmed  by  the  practice  of  the  Apostles  and  first  Christians  ;  and  it  treats  of  daily  pubba 
assemblies  and  hours  of  prayer. 

"  To  all  who  have  been  benefitted  and  instructed  by  Bishop  Patrick's  writings  (that  is,  to  all  who  ha»« 
with  due  care  read,  and  meditated,  and  prayed  over  anyone  of  them)  it  is  unnecessary  to  say  a  word 
in  commendation  of  the  work  before  us.  To  others  it  may  suffice  to  say,  that  the  sooner  they  make 
themselves  master  of  this,  and  the  other  admirable  works  of  his  lately  reprinted,  the  better  will  it  b* 
far  the  soundness  of  their  views  in  theology,  and  the  firmness  and  steadiness  of  their  growth  in  pieti 
and  Christian  virtue."' — Charleston  Gospel  Messenger. 

THE  GOLDEN  GROVE. 

A  choice  Manual,  containing  what  is  to  be  believed,  practised,  and  desired,  or  prayed 
for ;  the  prayers  being  fitted  for  the  several  days  of  the  week.  To  which  is  added, 
a  Guide  for  the  Penitent,  or  a  Model  drawn  up  for  the  help  of  devout  souls  wounded 
with  sin.  Also  Festival  Hymns,  &c.  By  the  Right  Rev.  Bishop  Jeremy  Taylor. 
1  vol.  16mo.    $0  50. 

"  The  name  of  Jeremy  Taylor  will  always  be  a  sufficient  passport  to  any  work  on  whose  title  page 
rt  appears.  Of  no  writer  of  his  period,  or  indeed  of  any  other  period,  could  it  be  more  truly  said,  that 
he  has  given  '  thoughts  that  breathe  in  words  that  burn.'  The  present  little  work  may  perhaps  be 
regarded  as  among  the  choicest  of  his  productions.  While  it  is  designed  to  be  a  guide  to  devotion,  it 
breathes  mucn  ol  The  spirit  of  devotion,  and  abounds  in  lessons  of  deep  practical  wisdom.  Its  author 
was  an  Episcopalian  and  Episcopalians  may  well  be  proud  of  him  ;  but  his  character  and  writings  can 
no  more  be  the  property  of  one  denomination  than  the  air  or  the  light,  or  any  other  of  God's  uui- 
»<er»al  blessings  to  the  world." — Albany  Advertiser. 

THOUGHTS    IN    PAST  YEARS. 

A  beautiful  collection  of  Poetry,  chiefly  Devotional.  By  the  author  of  "  The  Ca- 
thedral." 1  vol.  royal  16mo.,  elegantly  printed.  §1  25. 
"  This  is  a  new  Trans-atlantic  poetical  work,  and  although  we  have  not  much  confidence  in  our  own 
jndgment  of  poetry,  we  do  not  hesitate  to  venture  the  opinion  that  this  book  is  by  no  means  to  ba 
ranked  with  the  ephemeral  poetical  effusions  of  the  day.  It  is  made  up  of  miscellaneous  poems,  all 
o/  thern  of  a  moral  tendency,  and  many  of  them  breathing  a  spirit  of  deep  devotion  and  earnest 
piety." — Albany  Journal. 

THE  CHRISTMAS  BELLS: 

A  Tale  of  Holy  Tide,  and  other  Poems.  By  the  author  of  "  Constance,"  "  Virginia," 
&c.  1  vol.  royal  16mo.,  elegantly  ornamented.  $0  75. 
"Many  of  the  smaller  pieces  in  this  volume  have  appeared  from  time  to  time  in  various  journal* 
and  magazines,  and  have  been  received  with  unqualified  favour.  The  leading  poem  was  written  for 
the  most  part  during  the  season  whose  enjoyments  and  happy  influences  it  is  designed  to  commemo- 
rate. The  plan  of  it  was  suggested  by  the  perusal  of  Washington  Irving's  delightful  Essays  ou  the 
Christmas  Season,  in  the  Sketch  Book." — Preface. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


T&S  FB.ACTECA&  CHRISTIAN: 

Or  the  Devout  Penitent;  a  book  of  Devotion,  containing  the  whole  duty  of  a  Chris- 
tian in  all  occasions  and  necessities,  fitted  to  the  main  use  of  a  holy  life,  by  R. 
Sherlocke,  D.  D.,  with  a  life  of  the  Author,  by  the  Right  Rev.  Bishop  Wilson, 
Author  of  Sacra  Privala,  &c.    One  elegant  volume,  16mo.  75  cts. 
Of  the  singular  excellency  of  Dr.  Sherlocke's  character,  the  eminent  Bishop  Wilson  observes  : 
Pure  and  unaffected  piety,  charity  at  once  comprehensive  and  discriminating,  a  daily  self-denial 
and  bearing  of  the  Cross,  a  noble  superiority  to  the  world,  an  ever  burning  and  ever-active  zeal 
for  his  Master's  glory,  an  unshaken  fidelity  to  the  Church,  not  only  in  the  season  of  her  pros- 
perity, but  also  in  the  dark  days  of  her  adversity  ;  an  intellect,  holding  in  vigorous  gra.-p  the 
great  principles  of  Catholic  Truth  ;  a  moral  energy  realizing  these  principles  oeep  in  the  inner 
man,  and  exhibiting  them  in  outward  conduct  "beautiful  exceedingly."   Such  are  some  of  the 
prominent  features  of  his  character  as  drawn  in  life-like  form  by  the  pen  of  his  episcopal 
biographer. 

The  Practical  Christian  now  submitted  to  the  reader,  from  the  seventh  English  edition,  is  by 
far  the  most  important  of  all  Dr.  Sherlocke's  works.  It  was  a  work  of  gradual  growth  and  pro- 
gressive enlargement,  and  we  have  his  biographer's  testimony  to  the  fact,  that  he  made  it  the 
model  of  his  own  devotions—"  strictly  obsei  ving  himself  what  he  so  earnestly  recommended  to 
others."  The  following  devotions,  living  impressions  as  it  were  of  the  living  mould — bring  the 
tutor  of  Bishop  Wilson  again  before  us,  and  it  may  be  devoutly  hoped  that  as  their  author,  w  hen 
living,  succeeded  in  forming  one  of  the  noblest  chaiacters  in  the  Church's  Modern  Calendar,  so 
now,  though  absent  from  us  in  body,  this  his  work,  instinct  as  it  everywhere  is  with  his  own 
saintly  spirit,  may  tend  to  produce  many  more  sucli  chaiacters  to  the  glory  of  God  and  the  edi- 
fication of  his  Holy  Church. 

THE  TRUE  CHURCHMAN'S   COMPANION  IN   THE   CLOSET  I  OR,  A  COMPLETE 

MANUAL  OF  PRIVATE  DEVOTIONS  : 

Selected  from  the  writings  of  Archbishop  Laud,  Bishop  Andrews,  Bishop  Ken,  Dr. 
Hickes,  Mr.  Kettlewell,  Mr.  Spinckes,  and  other  eminent  old  English  divines. 
With  a  Preface  by  Rev.  Mr.  Spinckes.  Edited  by  Francis  E.  Paget,  M.  A.  One 
elegant  volume  16mo.,  $1  00. 

The  pious  reader  will  require  no  more  recommendation  of  this  volume  than  that  which  he 
will  find  in  its  title-page.  A  Manual  of  Prayers  compiled  from  the  devotional  writings  of  Laud 
and  Andrews,  Ken  and  Hickes,  Kettlewell  and  Spinckes,  cannot  be  otherwise  than  acceptable 
to  all  who  love  those  principles  which  they  unanimously  taught,  and  for  the  maintaining  of 
which,  (wifh  the  exception  of  the  good  Bishop  of  Wintor.  whose  lot  was  cast  in  tranquil  times.) 
they  suffered  according  to  the  measure  which  God  required  of  each  ;  to  all  who  would  lain  fol- 
low them  in  the  paths  of  self-denial,  spiritual-mindedness,  meeknes-  and  obedience.  And  that 
this  book  has  been  to  past  generations,  what  it  is  hoped  it  may  likewise  be  to  our  own,  is  evi- 
dent from  the  fact  that  it  is  one  of  the  few  of  the  devotional  works  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
which  continued  to  be  in  constant  demand  during  the  eighteenth.  Its  value  was  appreciated, 
and  it  continued  to  be  reprinted  from  time  to  time  to  the  middle  of  the  last  century  ;  and  it  is 
presented  to  the  public  once  more,  with  the  anxious  desire  that  as  it  found  favor  to  the  last, 
while  Church  principles  were  declining,  so  it  may  prove  acceptable  to  the  many,  who  (blessed 
be  God.)  seem  now  to  be  zealously  and  faithfully  seeking  their  way  back  to  the  "old  paths" 
from  which  we  have  wandered.— Editor's  Pkeface. 

OF  THE  IMITATION  OF  CHRIST : 

Four  books  by  Thomas  A.  Kempis.    One  elegantly  printed  volume,  16mo.,  $1  00. 
This  is  the  first  complete  American  edition  of  this  celebrated  book,  which  may  satisfactorily 
be  compared  with  the  Sacra  Privata  of  Bishop  WTilson ;  to  whom  also  the  character  of  its  emi- 
nent author  may  in  many  respects  be  compared. 

*  *  These  volumes  will  be  followed  by  others  of  approved  merit. 

OGILBY  ON  lAY-BArTISM: 

An  outline  on  the  Argument  against  the  validity  of  Lay-Baptism.    By  the  Rev. 

John  D.  Ogilby,  A.  M.,  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History.    One  vol.  12mo.,  75  cts. 

"  We  have  been  favorad  with  a  copy  of  the  above  work,  and  lose  no  time  in  announcing  its 
publication.  From  a  cursory  inspection  of  it,  we  take  it  to  be  a  thorough,  fearless,  and  very 
able  discussion  of  the  subject  which  it  proposes,  aiming  less  to  excite  inquiry,  than  to  satisfy  by 
learned  and  ingenious  argument,  inquiries  already  excited."— Churchman. 

THE  PRIMITIVE  DOCTRINE  OF  ELECTION: 

Or,  an  Historical  Inquiry  into  the  Ideality  and  Causation  of  Scriptural  Election,  as 
received  and  maintained  in  the  primitive  Church  of  Christ.  By  George  Stanley 
Faber,  B.  D.,  author  of  "  Difficulties  of  Romanism,"  "  Difficulties  of  Infidelity," 
&c.    Complete  in  one  volume  octavo.    $1  75. 

"Mr.  Faber  verifies  his  opinion  by  demonstration.  We  cannot  pay  a  higher  respect  to  his 
wo:  k  than  by  recommending  it  to  all."— Church  of  England  Quarterly  Review. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works 


BURNET  ON  THE  XXX!X  ARTICLES. 

An  Exposition  of  the  Thirty-nine  Articles  of  the  Church  of  England,  hy  Gilbert 
Burnet,  D.D.,  late  Bishop  of  Salisbury.  With  an  Appendix,  containing  the  Augsburg 
Confession — Creed  of  Pope  Pius  IV.,  &c.  Revised  and  corrected,  with  copious 
Notes  and  additional  References,  by  the  Rev.  James  R.  Page,  A.M.,  of  Queen's 
College,  Cambridge.     In  one  handsome  8vo.  volume.    $2  00. 

The  advantages  of  this  edition  over  all  others  may  be  stated  as  follows  : 

In  the  first  place,  the  learned  author's  text  has  been  preserved  with  strirt  fidelity. 

2d.  The  references  to  the  Fathers,  Councils,  and  other  authorities  have  been  almost  universally 

Terified:  and,  in  many  instances,  corrected  and  so  enlarged  as  to  render  them  easy  of  access  to  the 

student. 

3d.  A  large  number  of  Scripture  references  have  been  added.  In  different  parts  of  this  work,  Bish- 
op Burnet  lays  down  propositions  without  giving  the  Scripture  by  which  they  may  be  proved.  The 
The  editor  has,  however,  added  references  in  these  and  all  other  instances  where  they  might  be 
•onsidered  not  merely  additions,  but  also  improvements. 

4th.  The  Canons  and  decrees  of  Council  and  other  documents  of  importance  referred  to  have  been 
given  in  the  original,  and  from  the  most  authentic  sources — the  places  where  they  are  to  be  found 
being  specified. 

5th.  Copious  Notes  have  been  added,  containing,  besides  other  information,  notices  of  the  principal 
heretics  and  persons  of  note,  with  an  accurate  account  of  their  opinions.  Also  extracts  chiefly  from 
the  works  of  the  most  distinguished  diviues  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  opening  and 
illustrating  the  chief  points  in  controversy  between  us  and  the  church  of  Rome.  In  an  appendix  has 
also  been  given  the  Confession  of  Augsburg,  and  Creed  of  Pope  Pius  IV.,  in  the  English  and  original 
tongues,  and  in  the  original  only,  the  canons  and  rubric  of  the  mass. 

Indices  of  Texts  of  Scripture  and  of  the  matter  contained  in  the  Notes,  have  also  been  given,  to- 
gether with  a  list  of  authors  quoted  in  the  Editor's  portion  of  the  volume. 

In  fine,  the  Editor's  design  has  been  to  make,  as  far  as  was  possible,  within  such  a  compass,  this 
great  work  what  he  humbly  hopes  it  may  be  found— a  Manual  for  the  Theological  Student. 

"  The  valuable  References,  Notes,  and  Indices,  which  accompany  your  edition,  will  give  it  a 
vast  superiority  over  every  other."—  The  Bishop  oj  Winchester. 

"  The  editor  has  given  to  our  clergy  and  our  students  in  theology  an  edition  of  this  work,  which 
must  necessarily  supersede  every  other,  and  we  feel  he  deserves  well  at  the  hands  of  the  Church  of 
England,  which  he  has  so  materially  served." — Church  of  England  Quarterly  Review. 

"Bishop  Burnet  is  known  every  where  as  one  of  the  brightest  luminaries  the  Church  of  England 
has  ever  produced.  This  work  on  the  thirty-nine  articles,  has  always  been  regarded  as  among  the 
standard  theological  works  in  the  English  language  ;  and  though  it  must  have  peculiar  attractions  for 
an  Episcopalian,  as  an  exposition  of  his  articles  of  faith,  yet,  as  a  treasury  of  biblical  and  theological 
knowledge,  it  is  alike  valuable  to  Christians  of  every  communion.  It  deserves  not  merely  to  be  read, 
but  studied  ;  and  no  Christian  can  give  it  a  careful  perusal,  without  finding  his  views  of  divine  truth 
enlarged,  his  devout  affections  quickened,  and  his  value  for  the  religion  which  he  professes  greatly 
increased.  This,  and  '  Pearson  on  the  Creed,'  which  was  lately  issued  from  the  same  press,  belong 
to  the  same  general  class  ;  and  it  is  difficult  to  say  which  of  them  can  claim  the  higher  degree  of  ex- 
cellence."— Albany  Advertiser. 

"  No  Churchman,  no  Theologian,  can  stand  in  need  of  information  as  to  the  character  or  value  of 
Bishop  Burnet's  Exposition,  which  long  since  took  its  fitting  place  as  one  of  the  acknowledged  and  ad- 
mired standards  of  the  Church.  It  is  only  needful  that  we  speak  of  the  labours  of  the  editor  of  the 
present  edition,  and  these  appear  to  blend  a  fitting  modesty  with  eminent  industry  and  judgment- 
Thus,  while  Mr.  Page  has  carefully  verified,  and  in  many  instances  corrected  and  enlarged  the  refer- 
ences to  the  Fathers,  Councils  and  other  authorities,  and  greatly  multiplied  the  Scripture  citations — 
for  the  Bishop  seems  in  many  cases  to  have  forgotten  that  his  readers  would  not  all  be  as  familiar  with 
the  Sacred  Text  as  himself,  and  might  not  as  readily  find  a  passage  eTen  when  they  knew  it  existed 
— he  (Mr.  P.)  has  scrupulously  left  the  text  untouched,  and  added  whatever  illustrative  matter  he 
has  been  able  to  gather  in  the  form  of  Notes  and  an  Appendix.  The  documents  collected  in  to* 
ktter  are  of  great  and  abiding  value."— Tribune. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works.  8 
PEARSON  ON  THE  CREED. 

An  Exposition  of  the  Creed,  by  John  Pearson,  D.D.,  late  Bishop  of  Chester.  With 
an  Appendix,  containing  the  principal  Greek  and  Latin  Creeds.  Revised  and 
corrected  by  the  Rev.  W.  S.  Dobson,  M.A.,  Peterhouse,  Cambridge.  In  one  hand- 
some 8vo  volume.    $2  00. 

The  following  may  be  stated  as  the  advantages  of  this  tdition  over  all  others. 

First — Great  care  has  been  taken  to  correct  the  numerous  errors  in  the  references  to  the  texts  <rf 
Scripture  which  had  crept  in  by  reasoa  of  the  repeated  editions  through  which  this  admirable  work 
has  passed  ;  and  many  references,  as  will  be  seen  on  turning  to  the  Index  of  Texts,  have  been  added. 

Secondly — The  Quotations  in.  the  Notes  have  been  almost  universally  identified  and  the  reference* 
to  them  adjoined. 

Lastly — The  principal  Symbola  or  Creeds,  of  which  the  particular  Articles  have  been  cited  by  the 
Author,  have  been  annexed  ;  and  wherever  the  original  writers  have  given  the  Symbola  in  a  scattered 
and  disjointed  manner,  the  detached  parts  have  been  brought  into  a  successive  and  connected  point 
of  view.    These  have  been  added  in  chronological  order  in  the  form  of  an  Appendix. —  Vide  Editor. 

"  It  is  one  of  the  gratifying  circumstances  of  the  present  period  that  the  standard  authors  in  theo- 
logical literature  are  republished  in  a  portable  form,  and  at  a  price  which  renders  the  acquisition  of 
them  easy  to  the  student,  and  especially  foi  public  social  libraries. 

Among  the  works  which  should  thus  be  extensively  disseminated,  the  "  The  Exposition  of  tht 
Creed"  by  that  erudite  expositor,  Pearson,  cannot  be  too  highly  estimated  ;  both  for  its  doctrine*, 
and  also  for  the  vast  treasury  of  patristic  lore  and  quotations  from  ancient  writers,  which  are  emb»> 
died  in  the  volume. 

The  edition  of  this  work  which  has  just  been  issued  by  D.  Appleton  &  Co.,  is  far  superior  to  the 
original  folio  copy,  both  in  its  convenience  and  corr  ctness.  It  has  been  revised  with  great  care  by 
the  English  editor,  and  we  have  not  found  one  single  mistake  in  any  of  the  references  or  quotation* 
which  we  have  consulted. 

The  Creed  is  illustrated  in  its  Twelve  Articles  in  order — to  which  are  added  an  Appendix,  con- 
taining the  faith,  or  Symbolum  Irencei,  Tertulliani,  Origen,  Council  of  Nice,  Eusebius  Cuesarea,  Cyril, 
the  Arians,  Epiphanius,  Basil,  Constantinople,  Ruffinus,  Augustine,  Maximus  of  Thrace,  Eusebioe 
Gallicani,  Cassian,  Peter  Chrysologus,  Fortunatus,  Alcuin,  and  Ether — a  table  of  about  two  thoo- 
saud  texts  of  Scripture  which  are  cited  in  the  work,  and  an  Alphabetical  Index  of  the  most  important 
subjects,  both  full  and  minutely  applicable. 

On  all  the  fundamental  doctrines  of  Christianity,  this  volume  on  the  Creed,  by  Pearson,  is  a  lumin- 
ous and  learned  exposition  ;  and  is  peculiarly  valuable  to  American  students,  on  account  of  the  mul- 
tiplied rcfr-rences  to  the  Early  Christian  Theologians.  In  that  respect  it  is  a  complete  Thesaurus  ot 
antiquity — for  the  extracts  from  the  primitive  writers  in  the  original  Greek  and  Latin  languages, 
roclude  about  three  sevenths  of  the  whole  volume,  devoted  to  that  patristic  evidence,  upon  the  moat 
important  subjects  of  evangelical  doctrine. 

At  this  period,  when  so  much  attention  is  given  to  the  writers  of  the  early  centuries  after  the 
Christian  era,  Pearson's  "Exposition  of  the  Creed"  is  invaluable  to  the  American  theologian;  as  it 
furnishes  to  him  a  large  mass  of  information  to  which,  otherwise,  he  can  scarcely  have  access,  on  ao- 
oountof  the  scarcity  of  the  original  works,  and  which  he  would  not  have  time  to  explore,  even  were 
they  in  his  hand.  It  comprises  an  excellent  theological  system,  in  illustration  of  revealed  truth  ; 
and  an  expanded  view  of  the  various  controversies  upon  the  grand  themes  of  religious  principles  and 
practice,  with  much  valuable  biblical  elucidation. 

It  is  superfluous  to  recommend  Pearson's  '*  Expos. tion  of  the  Creed"  to  persons  acquainted  with 
theological  literature — but  this  notice  was  written  to  introduce  that  standard  work  to  persons  who 
have  not  had  the  opportunity  to  become  extensively  acquainted  with  those  choice  productions,  equally 
learned  and  precious,  with  which  the  Anglican  writers  of  the  seventeenth  century  enriched  the 
churches  and  the  world." — Christian  Intelligencer. 

"This  admirable  Exposition  of  the  Creed,  originally  preached  to  his  parishioners  in  the  form  ol 
Sermons,  has  been  long  and  deservedly  considered  among  the  best  and  most  useful  theological  pro- 
ductions of  our  language.  Of  Pearson  it  was  said,  'that  the  very  dust  of  his  writings  is  gold.'"— 
Dr.  Dibdin's  Library  Companion. 


A 

CATALOGUE 

OF 

BOOKS 

IN 

DIVINITY,  HISTORY,  BIOGRAPHY,  POETRY, 

VOYAGES  AND  TRAVELS, 
ARCHITECTURE  AND  ENGINEERING, 

AND 

PUBLISHED  BY 

D.   APPLETON  &  CO. 

NEW- YORK. 

And  Geo.  S.  Appleton,  No.  14S,  Chestnut-street,  Philadelphia. 
BURNET'S  HISTORY  of  the  REFORMATION. 

The  History  of  the  Reformation  of  the  Church  of  England,  by  Gilbert  Burnet,  D.D., 
late  Loro"  Bishop  of  Salisbury — with  the  Collection  of  Records  and  a  copious  In- 
dex,  revised  and  corrected,  with  additional  Notes  and  a  Preface,  by  the  Rev.  E. 
Nares,  P.D.,  late  Professor  of  Modern  History  in  the  University  of  Oxford.  Illus. 
tratcd  with  a  Frontispiece  and  twenty-three  engraved  Portraits,  forming  four  ele- 
gant 8vo.  vols.    $9  00. 

The  established  character  of  Eishop  Bnrnet's  History  of  the  Reformation  as  a  standard  work,  and 
most  valuable  historical  authority,  render  it  unnecessary  to  enter  into  any  analysis  of  its  merits,  far- 
ther than  briefly  to  state  the  advantages  of  this  edition  over  all  others. 

Often  as  this  celebrated  History  of  the  Reformation  of  the  Church  of  England  has  been  printed 
and  published,  often  as  it  has  been  read,  and  continually  as  it  has  been  referred  to  by  successive 
■writers,  interested  in  the  important  subject  of  which  it  treats  ;  yet  one  thing  seems  to  have  been  cod 
atantly  overlooked,  namely,  the  necessity  of  a  distinct  Preface  to  point  out,  and  to  explain  to  readers 
in  general,  the  particular  character  of  the  publication. 

It  is  a  work  of  too  great  magnitude  to  be  repeatedly  read  through,  and  though  its  eminence  as  an 
historical  w..rk,  must  always  be  such  as  to  render  it  imperatively  necessary  for  certain  writers  to  con 
suit  its  pages,  yet  in  every  reprint  of  it,  it  should.be  contemplated  by  the  publisher  not  merely  as  a 
book  of  reference,  but  as  one  to  be  read  like  other  books  of  history  regularly  from  the  beginning  to 
the  end,  not  by  professed  scholars  only,  or  by  persons  already  versed  in  history,  civil  or  ecclesiastical, 
but  by  such  as  may  be  only  beginning  their  historical  inquiries  and  researches — young  readers  and 
mere  students. 

Scarcely  any  other  book  of  equal  importance,  perhaps,  stands  so  much  in  need  of  preliminary  ex- 
planations as  this  great  work  of  the  celebrated  writer  whose  name  it  bears.  And  it  must  often,  we 
should  think,  have  been  a  matter  of  just  surprise  to  the  readers  of  this  history,  that,  in  the  editions 
hitherto  published,  the  errors  in  the  first  and  sec  ai  volumes  have  been  reprinted,  which  the  author 
himself  noticed  at  the  end  of  the  third  volume.  In  the  present  edition  the  text  will  be  found  correct- 
ed as  it  should  be,  and  many  explanatory  notes  added  throughout  the  work. 

"  The  extract  above  from  the  editor's  preface  defines  the  peculiar  merits  of  this  splendid  work, 
which  is  at  once  the  cheapest  and  the  most  elepant  edition  which  we  have  ever  seen,  of  this  well 
known  and  invaluable  history.  We  were  fed  on  the  old  folio  edition  of  Burnet  in  the  days  of  onr 
childhood,  and  the  impressions  which  its  facts  and  its  illust'ationj  then  made  on  the  mind,  hare 
never  been  etfaced,  but  have  had  their  full  share  in  making  us  thoroughly  Protestant,  and  aggressive 
enemies  of  the  church  of  Rome.  We  are  therefore  most  heartily  rejoiced  to  see  that  Appleton  <fc  Co. 
have  issued  this  standard  work  in  four  elegant  volumes,  at  only  two  dollars  a  volume  ;  and  when  we 
look  at  its  numerous  and  fine  engravings  of  many  distinguished  reformers,  and  its  more  than  two 
thousand  pages  of  reading  matter  on  handsome  paper  in  elegant  type,  we  cannot  doubt  that  thousand* 
of  our  readers  will  wish  to  introduce  it  into  their  families  without  delay." — .Y.  Y.  Observer. 


2     Divinity,  Theology )  Religious  and  Devotional  Worfo 


BURNET  ON  THE  XXXIX  ARTICLES. 

An  Exposition  of  the  Thirty-nine  Articles  of  the  Church  of  England,  by  Gilber? 
Burnet,  D.D.,  late  Bishop  of  Salisbury.  With  an  Appendix,  containing  the  Augsburg- 
Confession — Creed  of  Pope  Pius  IV.,  Sec.  Revised  and  corrected,  with  copiouB 
Notes  and  additional  References,  by  the  Rev.  James  R.  Page,  A.M.,  of  Queen's 
College,  Cambridge.     In  one  handsome  8vo.  volume.    $2  00. 

•  The  advantages  of  this  edition  over  all  others  may  be  stated  as  follows  : 
In  the  first  place,  the  learned  author's  text  has  been  preserved  with  strirt  fidelity. 
2d.  The  references  to  the  Fathers,  Councils,  and  other  authorities  have  been  almost  universally 

Terified:  and,  in  many  instances,  corrected  and  so  enlarged  as  to  render  them  easy  of  access  to  the 

student. 

3d.  A  large  number  of  Scripture  references  have  been  added.  In  different  parts  of  this  work,  Bish- 
op Burnet  lays  down  propositions  wrthout  givinz  the  Scripture  by  which  they  may  be  proved.  The 
The  editor  has,  however,  a-liied  references  in  these  and  all  other  instances  where  they  might  be 
considered  not  merely  additions,  but  also  improvements. 

4th.  The  Canons  and  decrees  of  Council  and  other  documents  of  importance  referred  to  have  been 
given  in  the  original,  and  from  the  iriost  authentic  sources— the  places  where  they  are  to  be  found 
being  specified. 

5th.  Copious  Notes  have  been  added,  combining,  besides  other  information,  notices  of  the  principal 
heretics  and  persons  of  note,  with  an  accurate  account  of  their  opinions.  Also  extracts  chiefly  from 
the  works  of  the  most  distinguished  divines  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  opening  and 
illustrating  the  chief  points  in  controversy  between  us  and  the  church  of  Rome.  In  an  appendix  has 
also  been  given  the  Confession  of  Augsburg,  and  Creed  of  Pope  Pius  IV.,  in  the  English  and  original 
tongues,  and  in  the  original  only,  the  canons  and  rn)>ric  of  the  mass. 

Indices  of  Texts  of  Scripture  and  of  the  matter  contained  in  the  Notes,  have  also  been  given,  to- 
gether with  a  list  of  authors  quoted  in  the  Editor's  portion  of  the  volume. 

In  fine,  the  Editor's  design  has  been  to  make,  as  far  as  was  possible,  within  such  a  compass,  this 
great  work  what  he  humbly  hopes  it  may  be  found— a  Manual  for  the  Theological  Student. 

"The  valuable  References,  Notes,  and  Indices,  which  accompany  yonr  edition,  will  give  it  a 
vast  superiority  over  every  other."  —The  Bishop  oj  Winchester. 

"  The  editor  has  given  to  our  clergy  and  our  students  in  theology  an  edition  ni  this  wor>..  whicl 
must  necessarily  supersede  every  other,  and  we  feel  he  deserves  well  at  the  hands  of  the  Church  ef 
England,  which  he  has  so  materially  served." — Church  of  England  Quarterly  Review. 

"Bishop  Burnet  is  known  every  where  as  one  of  the  brightest  luminaries  the  Church  of  England 
has  ever  produced.  This  work  on  the  thirty-nine  articles,  h3s  always  been  regarded  as  among  the 
standard  theological  works  in  the  English  language  ;  and  though  it  must  have  peculiar  attractions  for 
an  Episcopalian,  as  an  exposition  of  his  articles  of  faith,  yet,  as  a  treasury  of  biblicul  and  theological 
knowledge.it  is  alike  valuable  to  Christians  of  every  communion.  It  deserves  not  merely  to  be  read, 
but  studied  ;  and  no  Christian  can  give  it  a  careful  perusal,  without  finding  his  views  of  divine  truth 
enlarged,  his  devout  affections  quickened,  and  his  value  for  the  religion  which  he  professes  greatly 
increased.  This,  and  '  Pearson  on  the  Creed,'  which  was  lately  issued  from  the  same  press,  belong 
to  the  same  general  class  ;  and  it  is  difficult  to  say  which  of  them  can  claim  the  higheT  degree,  of  ex- 
cellence."— Albany  Advertiser. 

"  No  Churchman,  no  Theologian,  can  stand  in  need  of  information  as  to  the  character  or  value  of 
Bishop  Burnet's  Exposition,  which  long  since  took  its  fitting  place  as  one  of  the  acknowledged  and  ad- 
mired standards  of  the  Church.  It  is  only  needful  that  we  speak  of  the  labours  of  the  editor  of  the 
present  edition,  and  these  appear  to  blend  3  fitting  modesty  with  eminent  industry  and  judgment. 
Thus,  while  Mr.  Page  has  carefully  verified,  and  in  many  instances  corrected  and  enlarged  the  refer- 
ences to  the  Fathers,  Councils  and  other  authorities,  and  greatly  multiplied  the  Scripture  citations — 
for  the  Bishop  seems  in  many  cases  to  have  forgotten  that  his  readers  would  not  all  be  as  familiar  with 
the  Sacred  Text  as  himself,  and  might  not  as  readily  find  a  passage  even  when  they  knew  it  existed 
— he  (Mr.  P.)  has  scrupulously  left  the  text  untouched,  and  added  whatever  illustrative  matter  he 
has  been  able  to  gather  in  the  form  of  Notes  and  an  Appendix.  The  documents  collected  in  tbn 
latter  are  of  great  and  abiding  value." — Tribune. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works.  3 


PEARSON  ON  THE  CREED. 

An  Exposition  of  the  Creed,  by  John  Pearson,  D.D.,  late  Bishop  of  Chester.  With 
an  Appendix,  containing  the  principal  Greek  and  Latin  Creeds.  Revised  and 
corrected  by  the  Rev.  W.  S.  Dobson,  M.A.,  Peterhousc,  Cambridge.  In  one  hand- 
some Svo  volume.    $2  00. 

The  following  may  be  stated  as  the  advantages  of  this  tdition  over  all  otliers. 
First — Great  care  has  been  taken  to  correct  the  numerous  errors  in  the  references  to  the  texts  of 

Scripture  which  had  crept  in  by  reason  of  the  repeated  editions  through  which  this  admirable  work 

has  passed  ;  and  many  references,  as  will  be  seen  on  turning  to  the  Index  of  Texts,  have  been  added. 
Secondly — The  Quotations  in  the  Notes  have  been  almost  universally  identified  and  the  references 

lo  tkem  adjoined. 

Lastly — The  principal  Symbols  or  Creeds,  of  which  the  particular  Articles  have  been  cited  by  the 
Author,  have  been  annexed  ;  and  wherever  the  original  writers  have  given  the  Symbola  in  a  scattered 
and  disjointed  manner,  the  detached  parts  have  been  brought  into  a  successive  and  connected  point 
of  view.    These  have  been  added  in  chronological  order  in  the  form  of  an  Appendix. —  Vide  Editor. 

'•It  is  one  of  the  gratifying  circumstances  of  the  present  period  that  the  standard  authors  in  theo- 
logical literature  are  republished  in  a  portable  form,  and  at  a  price  which  renders  the  acquisition  of 
them  easy  to  the  student,  and  especially  foi  public  social  libraries. 

Among  the  works  which  should  thus  be  extensively  disseminated,  the  "  The  Exposition  of  the 
Creed"  by  that  erudite  expositor,  Pearson,  cannot  be  too  highly  estimated  ;  both  for  its  doctrines, 
and  also  for  the  vast  treasury  of  patristic  lore  and  quotations  from  ancient  writers,  which  are  embc 
died  in  the  volume. 

The  edition  of  this  work  which  has  just  been  issued  by  D.  Appleton  &  Co.,  is  far  superior  to  the 
original  folio  cony,  both  in  its  convenience  and  correctness.  It  has  been  revised  with  great  care  by 
the  English  editor,  and  we  have  not  found  one  single  mistake  in  any  of  the  references  or  quotations 
which  we  have  consulted. 

The  Creed  is  illustrated  in  its  Twelve  Articles  in  order— to  which  are  added  an  Appendix,  con- 
taining the  faith,  or  Synbolum  Irencei,  Tertu'licni,  Origen,  Council  of  Nice,  Eusebius  Cssarea,  Cyril, 
the  Avians,  Epiphanius,  Basil,  Constantinople,  Ruffinus,  Augustine,  Maximus  of  Thrace,  Eusebius 
Gailioani,  Cassian,  Peter  Chrysologus,  Fortunatus.  Alcuin,  aud  Ether— a  tabl»  of  about  two  thou- 
sand texls  of  Scripture  which  are  cited  in  the  work,  and  an  Alphabetical  Index  of  the  most  important 
subjects,  both  full  and  minutely  applicable. 

On  all  the  fundamental  doctrines  of  Christianity,  this  volume  on  the  Creed,  by  Pearson,  is  a  lumin- 
ous arid  learned  exposition  ;  and  is  peculiarly  valuable  to  American  students,  on  account  of  the  mul- 
tiplied references  to  the  Early  Christian  Theologians.  In  that  respect  it  is  a  complete  Thesaurus  of 
•Antiquity— for  the  extracts  from  the  primitive  writers  in  the  original  Greek  and  Latin  languages, 
include  about  three  sevenths  of  the  whole  volume,  devoted  to  that  patristic  evidence,  upon  the  most 
important  subjects  of  evangelical  doctrine. 

At  this  period,  when  so  much  attention  is  given  to  the  writers  of  the  early  centuries  after  the 
"Christian  era,  Pearson's  "  Exposition  of  the  Creed"  is  invaluable  to  the  American  theologian  ;  as  it 
furnishes  to  him  a  large  mass  of  information  to  which,  otherwise,  he  can  scarcely  have  access,  on  ac- 
count of  the  scarcity  of  the  original  works,  and  which  he  would  not  have  time  to  explore,  even  wfere 
they  in  his  hand.  It  comprises  an  excellent  theological  system,  in  illustration  of  revealed  truth  ; 
and  an  expanded  view  of  the  various  controversies  upon  the  grand  themes  of  religious  principles  and 
practice,  with  much  valuable  biblical  elucidation. 

It  is  superfluous  to  recommend  Pearson's  "  Exposition  of  the  Creed"  to  persons  acquainted  with 
theological  literature— but  this  notice  was  written  to  introduce  that  standard  work  to  persons  who 
have  not  had  the  opportunity  to  become  extensively  acquainted  with  those  choice  productions,  equally 
learned  and  precious,  with  which  the  Anglican  writers  of  the  seventeenth  century  enriched  the 
churches  and  the  world."—  Christian  Intelligencer. 

"  This  admirable  Exposition  of  the  Creed,  originally  preached  to  his  parishioners  in  the  form  of 
Sermons,  has  been  long  and  deservedly  considered  among  the  best  and  most  useful  theological  pro- 
ductions of  our  language.  Of  Pearson  it  was  said,  'that  the  very  dust  of  his  writings  is  gold.' "— • 
Dr.  Ikddin's  Library  Companion. 


4     Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works* 


PALMER'S  TREATISE  ON  THE  CHURCH. 

A  Treatise  on  the  Church  of  Christ.  Designed  chiefly  for  the  use  of  Students  in 
Theology.  By  the  Rev.  William  Palmer,  M.A.  of  Worcester  College,  Oxford. 
Edited  with  Notes,  by  the  Right  Rev.  W.  R.  Whittingham,  D.D.,  Bishop  of  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church  in  the  Diocese  of  Maryland.  Two  vols.  8vo., 
handsomely  printed  on  fine  paper.    $5  00. 

"  The  treatise  of  Mr.  Palmer,  is  the  best  exposition  and  vindication  of  Cbrrteh  Principles  that  we 
have  ever  read  ;  excelling  contemporaneous  treatises  in  depth  of  learning  and  solidity  of  judgment, 
as  much  as  it  excels  older  treatises  on  the  like  subjects,  in  adaptation  to  the  wants  and  habits  of  the 
age.  Of  its  influence  in  England,  where  it  has  passed  through  two  editions,  we  hive  not  the  means 
to  form  an  opinion  ;  but  we  believe  that  in  this  country  it  has  already,  even  before  its  reprint,  done 
more  to  restore  the  sound  tone  of  Catholic  principles  and  feeling  than  any  other  one  work  of  the  age. 
The  author's  learning  and  powers  cf  combination  and  arrangement,  great  as  they  obviously  are,  are 
less  remarkable  than  the  sterling  good  sense,  the  vigorous  and  solid  judgment,  which  isevcTy  where 
manifest  in  the  treatise,  and  confers  on  it  itsdistinctive  excellence.  The  style  of  the  author  is  distin- 
guished for  dignity  and  masculine  energy,  while  his  tone  is  everywhere  natural  ;  on  proper  occasions, 
reverential  ;  and  always,  so  far  as  we  remember,  sufficiently  conciliatory. 

"  To  our  clergy  and  intelligent  laity  who  desire  to  see  the  Church  justly  discriminated  from  Ro- 
manists on  the  one  hand,  and  dissenting  denominations  on  the  other,  we  earnestly  coinmenu  Palmer's 
Treatise  on  the  Church." — N.  Y.  Churchman. 

"  This  able,  elaborate,  and  learned  vindication  of  the  cktim  of  the  Protectant  Episcopal  Church,  !o  be  considere*.  the  troe 
Catholic  Church,  and  the  exposure  which  is  here  made  of  the  grounds  of  dirwrence  twtween  it  and  the  Romish  Chtfch,  and  of 
»he  baseless  pretensions  of  that  church  to  be  the  '  one  Holy  catholic,  and  Aposioirc  Church,'  will  assuredly  commend  these  vol- 
ume* to  the  favour  of  Churchmen. 

"  At  a  moment  wheD  Popery  as  is  well  expressed  in  the  American  Ed-tor's  preface,  is  spreading  among  us  *jv  '  the  aid  mainly 
of  imported  men,  money,  and  members,'  't  is  well,  by  a  true  relation  of  what  Popery  really  to  put  the  nation  on  guard 
against  its  encroachments.  This  service  is  done  by  this  treatise,  of  w  hich  it  were  recommendation  enough  to  say,  that  its  re- 
publication has  engaged  the  laoour3  ami  time  of,  and  is  commended  to  the  use  of  theological  studen  s  by,  certainly  net  the  lea*-, 
learned,  pious,  and  exemplary  of  our  American  Bishops.  The  publishers  deserve  a toll  share  of  commendation  for  the  handsome 
fanner  in  which  they  have  sent  forth  these  volumes."  -A*.  Y.  American. 

MAG  EE  ON   ATONEMENT  AND  SACRIFICE. 

Discourses  and  Dissertations  on  the  Scriptural  Doctrines  of  Atonement  and  Sacrifice^ 
and  on  the  Principal  Arguments  advanced,  and  the  Mode  of  Reasoning  employed 
by  the  Opponents  of  those  Doctrines,  as  held  by  the  Established  Church.  By  the 
late  most  Rev.  William  M;Gee,  D.D.,  Archbishop  of  Dublin.  Two  vols,  royal  8vo, 
beautifully  printed.    §5  00. 

"  This  is  one  of  the  ablest  critical  and  polemical  works  cf  modern  times.  Archbishop  Magee  is  truly  a  male>i3  herelirohiv: 
He  is  an  excellent  schoWr,  an  acute  reasoner.  and  is  possessed  ot  a  most  extensive  acquaintance  will'  the  wide  field  ot  argu- 
ment to  which  Ins  volume. are  devoted-  iheprofenB  ffiWieal  information  ea  a  variety  ot  topics  which  the  Archbishop  brings 
forward,  must  endear  bis  nan*  l0  ej]  lovers  of  CUrusiianr.y.  '-—Orme. 

HARE'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS. 

Sermons  to  a  Country  Congregation.  By  Augustus  William  Hare,  A.M.,  late  Fel- 
low  of  New  College,  and  Rector  of  xUton  Barnes.  One  vol.  royal  fcvo.   $2  25. 

"  Any  one  who  can  be  pVeased  w  ith  delicacy  of  thouefct  expressed  in  the  most  simple  language— any  one  who  can  feel  the 
charm  of  finding  r  radical  duties elnodajed  and  enforced  by  apt  and  raried  illu>-:r.i  .  .ons—  will  b«  dehglrted  with  this  volume, 
which  presents  us-wita  the  workings  of  a  pious  and  highly-gilied  mind."—  Q.uar.  Rivien* 

A   MANUAL  FOR  COMMUNICANTS; 

Or  the  Order  for  Administering  the  Holy  Communion ;  conveniently  arranged  with 
Meditations  and  Prayers  from  Old  English  Divines,  being  the  Eucharistica^f  Sam- 
uel Wilberforce,  M.A.,  Archdeacon  of  Surry,  (adapted °to  the  American  service.) 
Convenient  size  for  the  pocket.  §>37±. 

"  The  order  of  this  work  is  as  follows  :-First,  "  The  Exhortation  comprising  die  rwo  exhortations  which  are  inserted  ia 
the  Communion  Office  :  then  the  Ante-Communion  :"  next,  "  The  Canon  cf  the  Hrly  communion;  bei-inning  with  UV 
Offertory  and  ending  w  ith  the  I-orm  of  a,„mmisiennK  the  elenvnts  ;  and  lastly,  the  Post  Communion.  This  part  of  the  work  is 
she  Communion  t  Iffice  as  contained  in  the  Prayer  Book  slightly  altered  in  its  arrangement,  and  accompanied  with  a  few  short 
devotional  meditations  in  the  margin.  After  this  is  the  Introduction  by  Archdeacon  Wilberforce,  chiefly  on  the  importance  of 
attendance  el  the  Lord's  1  able,  anj  thecauscs  of  ihe  present  neglect  of  the  privilege. 

Wehave  next  a  br.ef  notice  of  the  writers  f.  om  whose  works  are  taken  the  extracts  which  form  the  body  cf  the  volume.  These 
are  Colel,Cranmer,  Jewel,  Hooker,  Andrews,  Sutton,  Laud,  Hall.  Hammond.  Taylor,  Leighton,  Previa!,  Patrick  Addison, 
Ken.SparroWjbeveridfe'e,  Hickes,  Comber,  Ketllewell,  Wilson,  and  Potter;  whose  names  are  arranged  in  chronological  order, 
with  a  menUon  fa  few  lines  ol  their  lives  and  characters.  The  remainder  of  the  work  is  divided  into  three  pans-  o?  which  tne 
fc-gt  consists  ol  Meditations  on  the  Holy  Communion  ;  the  second  of  Prayers  before  and  after  Communion  J  to  which  are  added, 
Bishop  W  ilson  s  Meditations  on  Select  Pasiages,  and  Bishop  Patrick's  Prayer  lor  one  who  cannot  publicly  communicate;  and 
the  third  ol  Belcct  passages  explanatory  of  the  Holy  Sacrament  and  the  benefilsof  its  worthy  reception. 

These  meditations,  prayer,  and  expositions,  are  given  in  the  very  words  of  the  illustrious  divines  above  mentioned  martyrs, 
«onfe«ors  and  doctors  ol  the  Uiuicu  :  and  they  form  altogether  such  a  body  of  instructive  matter  as  is  nowhere  else  to  be  found 
in  the  same  compass.  1  hough  collected  Irorn  various  authors,  the  whole  is  pervadel  by  a  unity  of  spirit  and  purpose;  and  we 
■sosl  earnestly  commend  the  work  as  better  fitted  than  any  other  which  we  know,  tosubserve  the  ends  of  sound  edification  and 
fcrveni  and  .ubsisntial  devotion.  The  American  reprint  has  been  edited  by  a  deacon  of  great  promise  in  the  Church,  and  »• 
appropriately  dedicated  to  the  Bishop  of  litis  diocese. ' '—  Churchman. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works.  5 

CHURCHMAN'S  LIBRARY. 

The  volumes  of  this  Standard  Series  are  printed  on  the  finest  paper,  elegantly  ornamented,  and 
buund  in  a  superior  manner,  and  uniform  in  size.  Bishop  Doane  says  of  this  collection,  "  I  write  to 
express  my  thanks  to  you  for  reprints  of  the  Oxford  Books  ;  first,  for  such  books,  and  secondly,  in  such 
a  style.  I  sincerely  hope  you  may  be  encouraged  to  go  on,  and  give  them  all  to  us.  You  will  dignify 
the  art  of  printing,  and  you  will  do  great  service  to  the  best  interest  of  the  country."  In  a  letter 
received  from  Bishop  Whittingham,  he  says,  "  I  had  forgotten  to  state  my  very  great  satisfaction  at 
your  commencement  of  a  series  of  Devotional  Works,  lately  republished  in  Oxford."  The  Publishers 
W  g  to  state  while  in  so  short  a  time  this  Library  has  increased  to  so  many  volumes,  they  are  encour- 
aged to  make  yet  larger  additions,  and  earnestly  hope  it  may  receive  all  the  encouragement  it  deserves. 

The  following  Volumes  have  already  appeared  : — 

THE   EARLY   ENGLISH  CHURCH. 

Or  Christian  History  of  England  in  early  British,  Saxon  and  Norman  Times.  By 
the  Rev.  Edward  Churton,  M.  A.  With  a  Preface,  by  the  Right  Rev.  Bishop 
Ives.    1  vol.  lGmo.  elegantly  ornamented.    $1  00. 

*'  The  following  delightful  pagps  place  before  us  some  of  the  choicest  examples — both  clerical  and  lay — of  the  tnie 
Christian  spirit,  in  the  EARLY  ENGLISH  CHURCH.  In  truth,  these  pages  are  crowded  with  weighty'lessons.  Here 
our  laity  will  find  that  these  noble  foundations  of  charity  in  the  mother  cojntry—  the  existence  of  which  they  have  been 
accustomed  to  ascribe  to  the  credulity  of  ignorance,  or  the  fears  of  superstition,  successfully  practised  Kpoii  by  the  arts 
of  pnes's,  had  a  higher  and  holier  origin — that  they  sprang  into  being  under  the  warm  impulses  of  thai  divine  And  ex- 
pansive beuevoleuce  of  which  the  constraining  power  of  Christ's  love  made  his  early  followers  such  large  partakers  at  tlrn 
period  while  yet  Christian  men  fully  recognised  then  high  vocations,  as  '  stewards  of  the  manifold  gifts  of  God,' -lived 
under  (he  abiding  conviction,  mat  we  are~noi  our  own,  but  that,  'bought  with  the  precious  blood  of  Christ,'  we  are 
*  hound  to  glorify  him  in  our  uodies  nod  our  i-pirits,  which  are  his.'  Here,  too,  our  clergy  may  learn  a  lesson  of  true  self- 
devotion  to  their  Master — may  see,  strikingly  and  beautifully  illustrated,  that  love  for  Christ,  and  that  zeal  for  his  king- 
dom, which  alone  can  bear  us  tranquilly  and  successfully  through  the  labours  and  trials  of  the  holy  ministry— may  see  the 
operation  of  the  true  missionary  spirit — the  spirit  of  endurance  and  self-sacrifice,  which  shrinks  from  no  obstacles  when 
UN!  ealvation  of  sinners  is  to  be  achieved  under  the  command  and  the  promise  of  the  Almighty  God — may  see,  in  short, 
an  impressive  and  instructive  exemplification  of  thai  chilj-iike  submission  to  God,  that  pure  and  simple  trust  in  him, 
which,  at  his  bidding,  performs  duty,  and  leaves  the  result  to  his  provi  Jence  and  grace. 

"But,  to  read  these  pages  with  profit,  we  must  pray  to  God  for  a  portion  of  that  spirit  which  indited  them,  and  which 
so  manifest  iy  control  the  events  which  they  record — must  read  them  with  a  spiritual  eye  ;  with  an  eye  intent  upon  discov- 
ering—not that  which  may  help  to  sustain  some  preconceived  notion,  but  that  which,  prompted  by  the  spirit  of  Chris:, 
and  accomplished  through  the  power  of  his  saving  truth,  exhibits  to  us  some  great  principle  of  C  r  istiac  action,  and  some 
powenul  luutive  t  '  go  aud  do  likewise.'  " — Fide  Preface. 

LEARN  TO  DIE. 

Disce  Mori,  Learn  to  Die :  a  Rehgious  Discourse,  moving  every  Christian  man  to 

 — °  KPmpmnranne  01  am  r>uu.    r>y  i^nnstopner  mutton,  u.  JJ..  laic 

Prebend  of  Westminster.    1  vol.  lGmo.,  elegantly  ornamented.    $1  00. 


n    I  ?  thre*  works  °f  Jms  excellent  author  lately  reprinted  in  England,  the  ■  Disce  Mori '  is,  in  our  judgment.  rJec^d  - 
e-llythe  best.    It  was  the  favourite  book  of  the  Bishop  of  Joly,  who,  (the  touching  incident  cannot  be  forgotten,  -lied 
It  was  this  fact,  we  believe,  winch  first  recalled  the  book  from  the  oblivion  into  winch  it  hail 


mi  the  groun 


iiir  readers  may  remember,  that  shortly  after  its  republication  in  England,  we  urged  an  Amencan  rerjrin- 
d  that  il  was  a  book  winch  would  prove  universally  acceptable  to  the  Church.  Such  is  Mill  our  opinion  ■ 
-c  u.  ..m  believe  that  a  single  journal  or  clergyman  in  the  Church  will  be  found  to  say  a  word  in  its  disparagement  ' 
but  ihat,  on  the  contrary,  all  will  unite  in  commending  il  as  one  of  the  verv  best  of  our  practical  works,  equally  devo ' 
tional  and  almost  equally  rich  with  the  similar  work  ot  Taylor,  and  free  from  those  features  with  winch  Taylor  startle 
such  weak  minds  as  have  a  morbid  dread  of  Romanism.  Our  columns  have  been,  and  now  that  the  book  is  reorinte  I 
will  again  be,  enriched  with  extracts  which  will  make  me  '  Disce  Mori '  favourably  known  to  our  readers  •'—  Chukiric'Z 


MEDITATIONS  ON  THE  SACRAMENT. 

Ciodly  Meditations  upon  the  most  Holy  Sacrament  of  the  Lord's  Supper.  Bv  Chris- 
topher Sutton,  D.  D.,  late  Prebend  of  Westminster.  1  vol.  royal  16mo.  elegantly 
ornamented.    §>1  00. 

»  We  announced  in  our  last  number  the  republication  in  this  country,  of  Sutton's  '  Meditations  on  the  Lord's  Supper  ' 
and  having  Since  read  the  work,  are  prepared  to  recommend  it  warmly  and  without  qualifica;ion  to  the  perusal  ot  our 
reader*.  It  is  purely  practical  ;  the  doctrine  of  the  Eucharist  being  touched  upon  onlv  in  so  far  as  was  necessary  to 
guard  against  error.  Its  sandard  ol  piety  11  very  high,  and  the  helps  which  it  affords  'to  a  devout  participation  of  the 
holy  sacrament  of  which  it  treats,  should  make  it  the  inseparable  companion  of  every  communicant.  W  e  know  unlet  il 
ot  no  work  on  the  subject  that  can  in  all  respects  be  compared  with  it ;  aud  for  its  agency  in  promoting  that  advancement 
in  holiness  alter  which  every  Christian  should  strive,  have  no  hesitation  in  classing  it  with  the  Treatwa  on  '  Holy  Living 
and  Dying  of  Bishop  Taylor,  and  the  •  Sacra  Privata  '  ol  Bishop  Wilson.  The  penod  at  which  the  book  was  written 
will  account  for,  and  excuse,  what  in  the  present  age  would  be  regarded  as  delects  of  style  ;  but  tjfcese  are  fewer  than 
might  have  been  expected,  and  are  soon  lost  sight  ot  in  the  contemplation  of  the  many  and 'great  ncelleiKics  with  which 
it  abounds.  The  publishers  have  done  good  service  to  the  country  in  the  publication  of  this  work,  which  is  a  benuUi.l 
reprint  ot  the  Oxtord  edition,  and  we  are  glad  to  learu  that  it  will  be  speedily  followed  by  the  '  Disce  Viverc  '  and  '  D.-te 
Men  '  of  the  same  author."— Baruier  of '.he  Cross. 


6      Divinity,  TJieology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


A  DISCOURSE  CONCERNING  PRAYER, 

And  the  frequenting  Daily  Public  Prayers.    By  Symon  Patrick,  D.  D.,  sometime 
Lord  Bishop  of  Ely.    Edited  by  Francis  E.  Paget,  M.  A.,  Chaplain  to  the  Lord 
Bishop  of  Oxford.    1  vol.  royal  lGmo.  elegantly  ornamented.    $0  75. 
"This  work  treats  of  the  nature  and  necessity  of  prayer,  of  the  sense  of  all  mankind  about  th:s 
matter,  especially  of  our  blessed  Saviour,  of  the  honour  done  us  by  God  in  admitting  us  into  his  pre- 
sence, and  of  the  great  benefits  we  receive  by  it.    It  shows  that  public  prayer  is  the  most  necessary 
el  all,  that  God  is  most  honoured  by  it,  that  it  is  most  advantageous  to  us,  and  most  suitable  to  the 
nature  of  man,  that  the  nature  of  a  Church  requires  it,  that  our  Saviour  has  taught  the  doctrine, 
-which  is  confirmed  by  the  practice  of  the  Apostles  and  first  Christians  ;  and  it  treats  of  daily  public 
assemblies  and  hours  of  prayer. 

"  To  all  who  have  been  benefitted  and  instructed  by  Eishop  Patrick's  writings  (that  is,  to  all  who  have 
■with  due  care  read,  and  meditated,  and  prayed  over  anyone  of  them)  it  js  unnecessary  to  say  a  word 
in  commendation  of  the  work  before  us.  To  others  it  may  suffice  to  say,  that  the  sooner  they  make 
themselves  master  of  this,  and  the  other  admirable  works  of  his  lately  reprinted,  the  better  will  it  be 
for  the  soundness  of  their  views  in  theology,  and  the  firmness  and  steadiness  of  their  growth  inpietv 
and  Christian  virtue." — Charleston  Gospel  Messenger. 

THE  GOLDEN  GROVE. 

A  choice  Manual,  containing  what  is  to  be  believed,  practised,  and  desired,  or  prayed 
for  ;  the  prayers  being  fitted  for  the  several  days  of  the  week.  To  which  is  added, 
a  Guide  for  the  Penitent,  or  a  Model  drawn  up  for  the  help  of  devout  souls  wounded 
with  sin.  Also  Festival  Hymns,  &,c.  By  the  Right  Rev.  Bishop  Jeremy  Taylor. 
1  vol.  ISmo.    $0  50. 

"  The  narce  of  Jeremy  Taylor  will  always  be  a  sufficient  passport  to  any  work  on  whose  title  page 
it  appears.  Of  no  writer  of  his  period,  or  indeed  of  any  other  period,  could  it  be  more  truly  said,  that 
he  has  given  '  thoughts  that  breathe  in  words  that  burn.'  The  present  little  work  may  perhaps  be 
regarded  a3  among  the  choicest  of  his  productions.  "While  it  is  designed  to  be  a  guide  to  devotion,  it 
breathes  mucn  of  the  spirit  of  devotion,  and  abounds  in  lessons  of  deep  practical  wisdom.  Its  author 
••vas  an  Episcopalian  and  Episcopalians  may  well  be  proud  of  him  ;  but  his  character  and  writings  can 
no  more  be  the  Dronertv  of  one  ilpnAmmoiinn  than  o-:r  m  tha  lin-ht.  or  any  richer  nf  {Sea's  uni- 
versal blessings  to  the  world."— Albany  Advertiser. 

THOUGHTS    IN    PAST  YEARS, 

A  beautiful  collection  of  Poetry,  chiefly  Devotional.  By  the  author  of  "  The  Ca- 
thedral." 1  vol.  royal  lGmo.,  elegantly  prmted.  $1  25. 
"  This  is  a  new  Trans-atlantic  poetical  work,  and  although  we  have  not  much  confidence  in  our  own 
judgment  of  poetry,  we  do  not  hesitate  to  venture  the  opinion  that  this  book  is  by  no  means  to  be 
ranked  with  the  ephemeral  poetical  effusions  of  the  day.  It 'is  made  up  of  miscellaneous  poems,  all 
of  them  of  a  moral  tendency,  and  many  of  them  breathing  a  spirit  of  deep  devotion  and  earnest 
piety." — Albany  Journal. 

THE  CHRISTMAS  BELLS: 

A  Talc  of  Holy  Tide,  and  other  Poems.  By  the  author  of  "  Constance,"  "  Virginia," 
&c.  1  vol.  royal  16mo.,  elegantly  ornamented.  $0  75. 
"Many  of  the  smaller  pieces  in  this  volume  have  appeared  from  time  to  time  in  various  journals 
and  magazines,  and  have  been  received  with  unqualified  favour.  The  leading  poem  was  written  for 
the  most  part  during  ths  season  whose  enjoyments  and  happy  influences  it  is  designed  to  commemo- 
rate. The  plan  of  it  was  suggested  by  the  perusal  of  Washington  living's  delightful  Essays  on  the 
Christmas  Season,  in  the  Sketch  Book."— Preface. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works.  7 


OGILBY  ON  LAY-BAPTISM. 

A.n  Outline  on  the  Argument  against  the  validity  of  Lay-Baptism.  By  the  Rev.  John  D.  Ogilby, 
A.  M.,  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History.  1  vol.  12tno.  $0  75. 
"We  can  but  acknowledge  the  receipt  of  this  volume,  on  a  subject  that  hardly  falls  under  the 
range  of  our  criticism.  The  author,  whose  baptism  of  two  persons,  who  had  previously  received 
lay-baptism,  has  raised  against  him  no  little  outcry,  has  been  induced  to  write  these  pages  in  his  own 
defence,  and  has  set  forth  in  them  the  principles  and  reasons  which  have  governed  his  practice.  He 
Hsks  fur  them,  what  we  doubt  not  they  will  receive,  a  patient  hearing." — N.  Y.  Ameiican. 

SCRIPTURE  AND  GEOLOGY. 

On  tne  Relation  between  the  Holy  Scriptures  and  some  parts  of  Geological  Science.  By  John  Pye 
Smith,  1)  D.,  author  of  the  Scripture  Testimony  of  the  Messiah,  &c.  &c.  1  vol.  12mo.  $1  25. 
'*  The  volume  consists  of  eight  lectures,  to  which  are  appended  seventy  pages  of  supplementary 
notes.  The  first  lecture  is  introductory  ;  the  second  is  scientifically  descriptive  of  the  principal  to- 
pics of  geological  science  ;  the  third  includes  a  research  into  the  creation  of  our  globe  :  the  fourth 
;aid  fifth  lectures  comprise  an  examination  of  the  deluge  ;  the  sixth  discusses  the  apparent  dissonance 
between  the  decisions  of  geologists,  and  the  hitherto  received  interpretation  of  Scripture,  with  an 
additional  exposition  of  the  diluvial  theory  ;  the  seventh  is  devoted  to  illustration  of  the  method  to 
interpret  the  Scriptures,  so  that  they  may  harmonize  with  the  discoveries  of  geology;  the  eighth  is 
the  peroration  of  the  whole  disquisition. 

•'We  most  earnestly  recommend  these  lectures  to  junior  theologians.  They  will  discover  new 
sources  of  Biblical  knowledge  unfolded  in  them,  and  if  their  geological  attainments  are  not  suffi- 
ciently ample  to  enable  them  to  grasp  all  Dr.  Smith's  arcana,  and  they  cannot  therefore  assent  to 
that  which  they  do  not  lucidly  comprehend,  and  of  which  they  have  not  convincing  evidence,  yet 
they  will  close  the  volume  infallibly  confirmed  in  the  verities  aunounced  in  the  ensuing  forceful  para- 
graph, with  which  the  seventh  lecture  so  nobly  and  eloquently  terminates. 

It  follows,' says  the  learned  professor,  'as  a  universal  truth,  that  the  Bible,  faithfully  inter- 
preted, erects  no  bar  aertinst  the  most  free  and  extensive  investigation,  the  most  comprehensive  and 
searching  induction.  Lot  but  the  investigation  be  sufficient,  and  the  induction  honest.  Let  observa- 
tion take  its  farthest  flight,  let  experiment  penetrate  into  all  the  recesses  of  nature,  let  the  veil  of 
ares  be  lifted  up  from  all  that  lias  been  hitherto  unknown,  if  such  a  course  were  possible,  Religion 
need  not  fear,  Christianity  is  secure.  True  science  will  always  pay  homage  to  the  Divine  Creator 
and  Sovereign  ;  of  whom,  and  through  whom,  and  to  whom  are  all  thnigs.  Unto  whom  be  glory  for 
ever.' :' — Xrw-  York  Observer. 

WORKS  BY  THE  REV.  DR.  SPRAGUE. 

TRUE  AND  FALSE  RELIGION. 

Lectures  illustrating  the  Contrast  between  True  Christianity  and  various  other  systems.    Ey  Wil- 
liam B.  Sprague,  D.D.    1  vol.  12ino.    $1  00. 

LECTURES  ON  REVIVALS  IN  RELIGION. 

By  W.  B.  Spuaoue,  D.D.    With  an  Introduce -r</  Essay  bv  Leonakd  Woods,  D.D.    1  vol.  12mo. 

$0"87£. 

LETTERS  TO  A  DAUGHTER 

On  Practical  Subjects.    By  W.  B.  Sprague,  D.D.     Fourth  edition,  revised  and  enlarged.  1vol. 

12mo.    $0  75. 
LECTURES   TO  YOUNG  PEOPLE. 

By  W.  B.  Si'Kague.  D.D.  With  an  Introductory  Address.  By  Samuel  Miller,  D.D.  Fourth 
edition.  1  vol.  12mo.  SO  87i. 
The  writings  of  Dr.  Sprague  are  too  well  known,  and  too  highly  estimated  by  the  Christian  Com- 
Munity  generally,  to  require  any  other  encomium  than  is  furnished  by  their  own  merits  ;  for  this  rea- 
son it  is  thought  unnecessary  to  subjoin  the  favourable  testimonies  borne  to  their  utility  and  excel- 
lence by  the  whole  circle  of  the  periodical  press  of  this  country,  and  the  fact  that  thev  have  each 
passed  through  several  editions  in  England,  sufficiently  attests  the  estimation  in  which  they  are  held 
abroad. 

SPIRITUAL  CHRISTIANITY. 

Lectures  on  Spiritual  Christianity.    By  Isaac  Taylor,  author  of  "  Spiritual  Despotism  "  <tc  &c 

1  vol.  12mo.  $0  75.  ' 
"  This  work  is  the  production  of  one  of  the  most  gifted  and  accomplished  minds  of  the  present  age. 
If  some  of  his  former  productions  may  have  been  thought  characterized  by  too  much  metaphyseal 
abstraction,  and  in  some  instances,  by  speculations  of  doubtful  importance,  the  present  volume  is  we 
think,  in  no  degree  liable  to  this  objection.  It  is  indeed  distinguished  for  deep  thought  and  accurate 
discrimination;  and  whoever  would  read  it  to  advantage,  must  task  his  faculties  in  a  much  higher 
degree  than  in  reading  ordinary  books  :  and  yet  it  contains  nothing  which  an  ordinary  degree  of  intel- 
ligence and  application  may  not  readily  comprehend.  The  view  which  it  gives  of  Christianity,  both 
as  a  system  of  truth  and  a  system  of  duty,  is  in  the  highest  degree  instructive  ;  and  its  tendencies  n»-e 
not  less  to  quicken  the  intellectual  faculties,  than  to  direct  and  elevate  the  moral  sensibilities.  We 
have  no  doubt  that  it  will  be  read  with  great  interest  by  those  who  read  to  find  materials  for  thought, 
and  that  it  is  destined  to  exert  a  most  important  influence,  especially  on  the  more  intellectual  classes.' 
ux  the  advancement  of  the  interests  of  truth  and  piety."— Albany  Evening  Journal. 


8     Divinity,  TJieology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


WORKS  BY  THE  REV.  JOHN  A.  JAMES. 

PASTORAL  ADDRESSES. 

By  Rev.  John  Angell  James.    With  an  Introduction  by  the  Rev.  Wm.  Adams.  1  vol.  ISmo.  $0  50. 

"  We  opine  that  the  publishers  of  this  volume  made  an  accurate  calculation  when  they  labelled 
these  'Pastoral  Addresses' — stereotyped;  for  they  are  among  the  choice  effusions  which  already 
have  so  highly  benefitted  Christian  society  from  the  noble  heart  and  richly-endowed  mind  of  Mr. 
James.  They  are  ministerial  counsels  to  the  members  of  his  congregation,  and  are  offered  as  monthly 
epistles  for  a  year,  beinsr  twelve  in  number,  and  are  thus  entitled  :  '  Increased  Holiness  of  the 
Church;  Spirituality  of  Mind;  Heavenly  Mindedness  ;  Assurance  of  Hope;  Practical  Religion  seen 
jn  everything;  A  Profitable  Sabbath;  Christian  Obligations  ;  Life  of  Faith;  Influence  of  elder 
Christians  ;  Spirit  of  Prayer  ;  Private  Prayer,  and  Self-Examination.' " — Christian  Intelligencer. 

THE  YOUNG  MAN  FROM  HOME. 

In  a  series  of  Letters,  especially  directed  for  the  Moral  Advancement  of  Youth.  By  the  Rev.  Jon* 
Angell  James.  Fifth  edition.  1  vol.  ISmo.  37}  Cents. 
"  This  work,  from  the  able  and  prolific  pen  of  Mr.  James,  is  not  inferior,  we  think,  to  any  of  its  pre- 
decessors. It  contemplates  a  young  man  at  the  most  critical  period  of  life,  and  meets  him  at  every 
point  as  a  guide  in  the  paths  of  virtue,  as  a  guard  from  the  contagious  influence  of  vice.  Every 
young  man  who  desires  to  form  a  virtuous  and  useful  character,  should  possess  himself  of  this  admir- 
able work  ;  and  every  Christian  parent,  whose  sons  are  leaving  the  paternal  mansion  for  another 
home,  should  take  care  that  they  carry  away  with  them  this  rich  treasury  of  Christian  counsel  and 
instruction." — Albany  Advertiser. 

THE  CHRISTIAN  PROFESSOR. 

Addressed  in  a  series  of  Counsels  and  Cautions  to  the  Members  of  Christian  Churches.  By  Rev. 
John  Angell  James.  1  vol.  18mo.  621  Cents. 
"  The  author  remarks  in  this  excellent  volume  :  '  When  I  look  into  the  New  Testament  and  read 
•what  a  Christian  should  be,  and  then  look  into  the  church  of  God,  and  see  what  Christians  are,  1  am 
painfully  affected  by  observing  the  dissimilarity  ;  and  in  my  jealousy  for  the  honour  of  the  Christian 
profession,  have  made  this  effort,  perhaps  a  feeble  one,  and  certainly  an  anxious  one,  to  remove  its 
blemishes,  to  restore  its  impaired  beauty,  and  thus  raise  its  reputation.' 

'  *  It  is  not  my  intention  to  enter  into  the  consideration  of  private,  experimental,  or  doctrinal  reli- 
gion, so  much  as  into  its  practical  parts  ;  and  to  contemplate  the  believer  rather  as  a  professor,  than  a 
Christian,  or  at  least,  rather  as  a  Christian  in  relation  to  the  world,  than  in  his  individual  capacity, 
or  in  his  retirement.' 

"  The  following  are  the  divisions  under  which  he  treats  his  subject,  viz  :  What  the  Christian  pro- 
fession imports  ;  its  Obligations  and  Designs  :  the  Danger  of  Self-Deception  ;  the  Young  Professor; 
an  attempt  to  compare  the  present  generation  of  Professors  with  others  that  have  preceded  them  ;  the 
necessity  and  importance  of  Professors  not  being  satisfied  with  low  degrees  of  Piety,  and  oftheir  seek- 
ing to  attain  to  eminence  ;  the  duty  of  Professors  to  avoid  the  appearance  of  evil ;  on  Conformities  to 
the  World  ;  on  the  Conduct  of  Professors  in  reference  to  Politics  ;  on  Brotherly  Love  ;  the  Influence 
ot  Professors  ;  their  Conduct  towards  Unconverted  Relatives,  the  Unmarried  Professor;  the  Pro- 
fessor in  Prosperity  ;  in  adversity;  the  Conduct  of  Professors  away  from  Home;  the  Backsliding 
Professor  ;  on  the  necessity  of  the  Holy  Spirit's  Influence  to  sustain  the  Christian  Profession ;  the 
Dying  Professor." — N.  Y.  Observer. 

THE  ANXIOUS  ENQUIRER  AFTER  SALVATION 

Directed  and  Encouraged.    By  Rev.  John  Angell  James.    1  vol.  18mo.  371  cents. 
Twenty  thousand  copies  of  this  excellent  little  volume  have  already  been  sold,  which  fally  a'.tpsts 
the  high  estimation  the  work  has  attained  with  the  religious  community. 

HAPPINESS,  ITS  NATURE  AND  SOURCES. 

By  Rev.  J.  A.  James.  1  vol.  32mo.  25  cents. 
"  This  is  written  hi  the  excellent  author's  best  vein.  He  has  with  a  searching  fidelity,  exposed  the 
various  unsatisfying  expedients  by  which  the  natural  heart  seeks  to  attain  the  gTeat  end  and  aim  of 
all— happiness,  and  with  powerful  and  touching  exhortations  directed  it  to  the  never-failing  source  of 
all  good.  The  author  does  not  engage  himself  in  speculations  or  theories.  The  results  of  extended 
observation,  the  testimony  of  well-attested  experience,  are  arrayed,  in  the  light  of  which  the  true  way 
and  the  false  are  clearly  seen.  It  is  eloquently  and  pointedly  written.  Abetter  book  we  have  not  in 
a  long  time  seen." — Evangelist. 

THE  WIDOW  DIRECTED 

To  the  Widow's  God.  Ey  the  Rev.  John  Angell  James.  1  vol.  18mo.  371  cents. 
"  If  any  thins;  more  were  necessary  to  give  this  book  currency  with  the  Christian  community  than 
the  name  of  its  author,  we  should  have  it  in  the  peculiarly  tender  and  interesting  nature  of  the  sub- 
ject on  which  he  writes.  He  has  written  many  good  books,  and  all  belong  to  the  same  general  class  ; 
and  though  some  of  them  are  more  generally  applicable  than  this,  yet  in  no  one,  perhaps,  has  he  dis- 
covered a  more  skilful  hand,  or  a  more  tender  and  devout  spirit.  The  book  is  worthy  to  be  read  by 
others  besides  the  class  for  which  it  is  especially  designed  ;  and  we  doubt  not  that  it  is  destined  to 
come  as  a  friendly  visiter  to  many  a  house  of  mourning,  aud  as  a  healing  balm  to  many  a  wounded 
neart." — If.  Y.  Observer. 


Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works.  9 

WORKS  BY  REV,  ROBT.  PHILIP. 

THE  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN, 

Author  of  The  PilgTim's  Progress.    By  Robert  Philip.    With  a  fine  Portrait.    1  vol.  12nio.    $1  25. 

THE  LIFE  AND  OPINIONS  OF  DR.  MILNE, 

Missionary  to  China.    Illustrated  by  Biographical  Annals  of  Asiatic  Missions,  from  Primitive  Protes- 
tant Times  ;  intended  as  a  Guide  to  Missionary  Spirit.    By  Robert  Philip.    1  vol.  12mo.    50  cts. 

"  The  name  of  Philip  has  in  this  country,  as  well  as  in  Great  Britain,  become  a  passport  to  rn'.b- 
lic  favour.  Though  the  subject  of  this  memoir  may  not  be  surrounded  with  the  same  splendid  attrac- 
tions as  was  that  of  the  memoir  of  Bunyan,  yet  it  is  one  of  very  great  interest ;  and  to  the  Christian, 
reader,  and  especially  to  those  who  are  deeply  interested  in  the  cause  of  missions,  it  will  probably 
bear  a  comparison  with  almost  any  that  have  gone  before  it.  The  work  is  executed  with  great  skill, 
and  embodies  a  vast  amount  of  valuable  missionary  intelligence,  besides  a  rich  variety  of  personal 
incidents,  adapted  to  gratify  not  only  the  missionary  or  the  Christian,  but  the  more  general  reader.'* 
— Observer. 

YOUNG    MAN'S   CLOSET  LIBRARY. 

By  Robert  Philip.     With  an  Introductory  Essay  by  Rev.  Albert  Barnes.   1  vol.  12mo.  $100. 

LOVE  OF  THE  SPIRIT,  Traced  in  his  Work  :  a  Companion  to  the  Experimental  Guides.  By 
Robert  Phihp.    1  vol.  18mo.    50  cts. 

DEVOTIONAL  AND  EXPERIMENTAL  GUIDES.    By  Robert  Philip.    With  an  Introduc- 
tory Essay  by  Rev.  Albert  Barnes.    2  vols.  12mo.    $1  75.    Containing  : 

Guide  to  the  Perplexed.  Guide  to  the  Doubting. 

Do.     do.    Devotional.  Do.     do.  Conscientious. 

Do.     do.     Thoughtful.  Do.     do.  Redemption. 

LADY'S   CLOSET  LIBRARY. 

AS  FOLLOWS  : 

THE  MARYS  ;  or  Beauty  of  Female  Holiness.    By  Robert  Philip.    1  vol.  ISmo.    50  cts. 

THE  MARTHAS ;  or  Varieties  of  Female  Piety.    By  Robert  Philip.    1  vol.  18mo.    50  cts. 

THE  LYDIAS;  or  Development  of  Female  Character.    By  Robert  Philip.    1  vol.  18mo.    50  cts. 

The  MATERNAL  SERIES  of  the  above  popular  Library  is  now  ready,  entitled 

THE  HANNAHS  ;  or  Maternal  Influence  of  Sons.    By  Robert  Philip.    1  vol.  18mo.    50  cts. 

"  The  author  of  this  work  is  known  to  the  public  as  one  of  the  most  prolific  writers  of  the  day,  and 
scarcely  any  writer  in  the  department  which  he  occupies^  has  acquired  so  extensive  and  well-merited 
a  popularity.  The  present  volume,  as  its  title  denotes,  is  devoted  to  an  illustration  of  the  influence  of 
mothers  on  their  sons  ;  and  the  subject  is  treated  with  the  same  originality  and  beauty  which  char- 
acterize the  author's  other  works.  It  will  be  found  to  be  a  most  delightful  and  useful  companion  in 
the  nursery,  and  its  influence  can  hardly  fail  to  be  felt;  first,  in  quickening  the  sense  of  responsibi- 
lity on  the  part  of  mothers  ;  and  next,  in  forming  the  character  of  the  rising  generation  to  a  higher 
standard  of  intelligence  and  virtue.'' — Evangelist. 


GEMS    FROM  TRAVELLERS. 

illustrative  cf  various  passages  in  the  Holy  Scripture.  with  nearly  one  hundred  Engravings.  Among 
the  authorities  quoted  will  be  found  the  following  distinguished  names  :  Harmer,  Laborde,  Lane, 
Madden,  Clarke,  Fococke,  Chandler,  Malcom,  Hartley,  Rus*el,  Jcwitt,  Came,  Shaw,  Morier,  Nei- 
buhr,  Bruce,  Calmet,  H.  Blunt,  Belzoni,  Lord  Lindsay,       &c    1  vol.  12mo.    $1  00. 
"  The  Holv  Scriptures  contain  manv  passages  full  of  importance  and  beauty,  but  not  generally 
understood,  because  thev  contain  allusion  to  manners  acd  customs,  familiar  indeed  to  those  to  whora 
they  were  originally  addressed,  but  imperfectly  kno-»n  to  us.    In  order  to  obviate  this  difficulty,  this 
volume  is  now  presented  to  the  public,  consisting  ci  extracts  from  the  narratives  of  travellers  who 
have  recorded  the  customs  of  the  oriental  nation,  fro"  whom  we  learn  that  some  usage*  were  re 
tained  among  them  to  this  dav,  such  as  existed  at  the  times  when  the  Scriptures  were  written,  and 
that  these  names  are  in  many  instances  little  chanced  since  the  patriarchal  times.    The  compiler  of 
this  volume  trusts  that  it  mav  be  the  mear*.  under  God  s  providence,  of  leading  unlearned  readers  to 
a  more  general  acquaintance  with  Eastern  customs,  and I  assist  them  to  a  clearer  perception  of  tho 
propriety  and  beauty  of  the  illustrations  so  ofton  drawn  from  them  in  the  Bible. 


10    Divinity,  Theology,  Religious  and  Devotional  Works. 


WILLIAMS'S   MISSIONARY  ENTERPRISES. 

A  Narrative  of  Missionary  Enterprises  and  Triumphs  in  the  South  Seas,  with  Remarks  upon  the  Na* 
tural  History  of  the  Islands,  Origin,  Language,  Tradition  and  Usages  of  the  Inhabitants.  By  the 
Rev.  John  Williams,  of  the  London  Missionary  Society.  Numerous  plates.  1  vol.  large  12mo.  §1  50, 
»  We  have  been  greatly  delighted  with  this  work.  And  if  asked,  why  1  we  answer,  because  ii  furnishes  the  most  fuil 
mid  satisfactory  account  of  Polynesia,  the  isles  of  the  Pacific,  we  have  any  where  met  with.  2.  It  relates  facts,  occurren- 
ces, and  incident?,  of  which  the  author  was  eve  and  ear  witness,  3.  It  incideiitly  gives  a  full-length  portrait  of  the  mis- 
sionary character  of  the  present,  aire  ;  a  portrait  that  even  Satan  must  admire,  though  •  he  cannot  love.  4.  It  fairly 
develops  the  true  spirit  of  the  Christian  missions,  and  the  principles  on  winch  they  are  successtully  conducted.  5.  It  ex- 
hibits the  astonishing  power  of  the  gospel  in  the  transformation  of  the  most  degraded  class  of  human  being's.  6.  It  evin- 
ces the  inseparable  connexion  between  Christianity  and  civilization:  between  die  gospel  received,  and  man's  present 
happiness.  7.  It  illustrates  the  grace  of  God,  as  displayed  in  the  triumphant  death  ot  heathen  converts.  8.  It  exposes 
the  ignorance  and  wickedness  of  those  who  misrepresent  the  design  and  operations  of  Christian  missions.  9.  It  demon- 
strates that  ihe  '  isles  of  the  sea'  are  wailing  for  God's  law,  and  that  God's  time  has  come  lor  their  conversion.  10.  Il 
urges  powerfully  to  greatly  enlarged  erfon  lor  the  '  immediate  emancipation'  of  all  the  slaves  of  Satau  from  the  bondage 
of  thousands  of  years.  t 

"  Besides  these,  we  might  state  many  other  reasons  for  our  high  satisfaction  with  this  transatlantic  volume.  It  is  writ- 
ten in  a  style  of  great  simplicity,  in  a  spirit  of  great  meekness,  in  a  tone  of  candour  and  modesty,  that  we  much  admire. 
It  conveys' no  small  amount  of  valuable  geographical  and  geological  information:  much  of  it  new  to  us,  and  probably  to 
others,  'it  is  replete  with  distinct  references  to  the  hand  of  Divine  Providence,  and  with  devout  reflections,  that  render 
it  valuable,  even  as  an  'aid  to  devotion.'  His  throughout  highly  attractive  for  the  variety  of  its  matter,  for  the  fairness 
of  its  occasional  discussions  on  some  mooted  questions  of  natural  history,  &c,  for"  the  light  it  throws  on  the  social  condi- 
tion of  different  tribes  of  savages,  and  their  intellectual  character,  and  for  the  continuity  of  the  whole  story. 

"  Other  minds  may  not  be  affected  like  our  own.  But  if  the  practised  reader  of  novels  and  romances  finds  the  charms 
of  fiction  working  as  powerfully  to  withdraw  his  mind  from  all  things  around  him,  as  we  have  found  the  charms  of  the-e 
authentic  '  .Missionary  Enterprises'  working  on  ourselves,  we  wonder  not  at  his  attachment  to  them,  however  unjustifi- 
able it  may  be.  After  once  entering  fairly  into  the  spirit  of  the  narrative,  it  is  hardly  possible  lor  us  to  conceive  ot  a 
pious  mind  that  can  'let  it  go'  till  U  shall  have  been  '  devoured.'— Evangelist. 

MISSIONARY'S  FAREWELL. 

By  the  Rev.  John  Williams,  author  of  "  Missionary  Enterprises,"  &c.    1  vol.  18mo.    3TJ-  cts 
THE   MARTYRED  MISSIONARIES. 

Memoirs  of  the  Rev.  Samuel  Munson  and  the  Rev.  Henry  Lyman,  late  Missionaries  to  the  Indian 
Archipelago,  with  the  Journal  of  their  Exploring  Tour.  By  the  Raw  William  Thompson.  1  vol. 
12mo.    62?  cents. 

THE   METROPOLITAN  PULPIT; 

Or  Sketches  of  the  most  Popular  Preachers  in  London.  By  the  anther  of  Random  Recollections,  Tha 
Great  Metropolis,  &c.  &c.    1  vol.  12mo.  $100. 

"We  thought  Mr.  Grant,  the  author  of  this  entertaining  volume,  had  drawn  his  last  draught  of  observation  upon  the 
British  Metropolis,  long  ago.  Statesmen  and  Lawyers— Chimney  Sweeps  and  Pickpockets— Paupers'and  Parish-Beadle's1 
— Maniacs  and  Actors,  each  and  all,  have  had  their  peculiari  les  exhibited  in  the  most  flattering  colours,  and  now  we  are 
introduced  to  a  whole  batch  of  reverend  gentlemen,  for  the  express  purpose,  it  would  seem,  to  show  how  far  the  author's 
absurdity  would  go.  We  do  not  mean  by  this,  to  pass  sentence  of  condemnation  on  the  book,  which  is  a  much  more  com- 
mendable production  than  any  thing  we  have  seen  before  from  the  same  pen — much  more  judicious  in  the  general  estimate 
of  moral  and  intellectual  worth,  moVe  faithful  in  the  delineation  of  character,  and  by  far  less  tedious  in  itsdeiails.  But 
surely,  Mi.  Grant  might  have  known,  that  it  was  not  exactly  suited  to  the  dignity  of  the  subject,  to  place  the  ciergy  imme- 
diately on  the  rear  of  that  heterogeneous  mass  of  beings,  with  whose  deeds  and  eccentricities  he  has  so  lately  entertained 
the  public.  Few,  however,  wilt  he  found,  disposed  to  quarrel  on  this  point.  Therefore,  we  earnestly  recommend  the 
volume  to  the  public."— Expositor. 

CRUDEN'S  CONCORDANCE. 

Containing  all  the  Words  to  be  found  in  the  large  Work,  relating  to  the  New  Testament.  1  vol. 
18mo.    50  cants. 

THE   POLYM1CRIAN   NEW  TESTAMENT. 

Numerous  References,  Maps,  &c.       1  vol.  1 8mo.     00  cents. 

THE  SACRED  CHOIR: 
A  COLLECTION  OF  CHURCH  MUSIC. 

Consisting  of  Selections  from  the  most  distinguished  authors,  among  whom  are  the  r;-rnes  of 
Haydn,  Mozart,  Beethoven,  Pergolessi,  &c.  &c.  :  with  several  pieces  of  Music  by  the 
author;  also  a  Progressive  Elementary  System  of  Instruction  for  Pupils.  By  George  Kingslxy, 
author  of  the  Social  Choir,  &c.  &c.    Fourth  edition.    $0  75. 

£3=  The  following  are  among  the  mmy  favourable  opinions  expressed  of  this  work. 

.  ,  From-!ieCoimi,ieeof  the  Choir  of  *¥ale  Colletre. 
«  Sir,- We  have  been  using  tor  some  life  past  yo„r  new  publication  in  (he  choir  with  which  wp  are  connected.  We 
take  pleasure  in  stating  to  you  our  entire  sathfactio,  will,  the  manner  in  which  it  has  been  compiled  and  harmonized,  and 
would  willingly  recommend  it  to  any  of  the  associates  desiring-  a  collection  of  Sacred  Music  of  a  sterling  character,  and 
orig.na  matter  Tne  melodies  are  quite  varied  ai.d  of  unusually  pleasing  character ;  and  uniting  as  they  do,  the  de- 
vot.oual  with  the  pleasing,  we  have  no  hesitation  moving  -hem  our  preference  to  any  other  collection  of  a  similar  charac- 
ter at  present  111  use  among  the  churches."  r  * 

„         „      ,     „.      ,,,    ,  Fr?m  thne  Leafters  of  Choir*. 

«  Mr  George  Kingsley,  Sir  -We  have  examined  'he  J  Sacred  Choir'  enough  to  lead  Us  to  appreciate  the  work  as  (he 
bett  publication  of  Sacred  Music  extant  It _  is  beautifully  priced  awl  substantially  bou.ul,  conferring  credit  on  tha 
publishers.     \/e  beapeak  lor  the  '  Sacred  Music  Choir'  an  extensivt  circulation. 

O.  S.  Bowdoin, 
SiiRerely  yours,  E.  O.  Godwin, 

1  ,  D.  Ingraham." 


History Biography,  tyc.  11 


THE   NATURAL  HISTORY   OF  SOCIETY, 

IN  THE  BARBAROUS  AND  CIVILIZED  STATE. 

An  Essay  towards  Discovering  the  Origin  and  Course  of  Human  Improvement. 
By  W.  Cooke  Taylor,  LL.D.,  Sec,  of  Trinity  College,  Dublin.  Handsomely 
printed  on  fine  paper.   2  vols.  12mo.    $2  25. 

"  The  design  of  this  work  is  to  determine,  from  an  examination  of  the  various  furms  in  which  society 
has  been  found,  what  was  the  origin  of  civilization  ;  and  under  what  circumstances  those  attributes 
of  humanity  which  in  one  country-  become  the  foundation  of  social  happiness,  are  in  another  perverted 
to  the  production  of  general  misery.  For  this  purpose  the  author  has  separately  examined  the  prin- 
cipal elements  by  which  society,  under  all  its  aspects,  is  held  together,  and  traced  each  to  its  source 
in  human  nature  ;  he  has  then  directed  attention  to  the  development  of  those  principles,  and  pointed 
out  the  circumstances  by  which  they  were  perfected  oh  the  one  hand,  or  corrupted  on  the  other. 
Having  thus,  by  a  rigid  analysis,  shown  what  the  elements  and  conditions  of  civilization  are,  he  has 
tested  the  accuracy  of  his  results  by  applying  them  to  the  history  of  civilization  itself.  From  this 
statement  of  the  scope  of  the  work,"aud  of  the  method  in  which  the  author  proceeds  to  develop  his 
investigations,  the  reader  will  at  once  recognise  its  importance,  and  it  now  rests  with  us  to  inquire 
regarding  the  degree  of  ability  displayed  in  the  execution  of  the  design.  To  detect  all  the  wrongs 
and  errors  of  humanity,  in  its  various  conditions  from  dark  to  enlightened  ages — in  the  barbarous  and 
civilized  state,  and  to  provide  appropriate  remedies  for  these,  is  a  task  no  man  would  undertake  to 
perforin,  with  the  hope  of  executing  it  perfectly  and  completely ;  but  that  much  may  be  effected 
toward*  improving  the  condition  of  mankind,  by  a  close  investigation  into  the  moral  elements  which 
form  the  basis  of  the  various  modifications  society  has  assumed  throughout  different  2ges,  in  the  bar- 
liarous  as  well  as  more  civilized  nations,  cannot  be  doubted  ;  and  it  affords  us  sincere  gratification  to 
find  this  subject,  so  fraught  with  important  objects  for  refection,  considered  and  laid  before  the  public 
by  so  able  a  writer.  We  have  perused  the  work  with  more  interest  and  profit  than  any  that  has  come 
under  our  notice  for  some  time,  and  earnestly  request  the  studious  attention  of  our  readers  to  the  im- 
portant suggestions  and  imposing  truths  it  at  every  page  discloses," — Scotiijh  Journal. 

CARLYLE  ON   HISTORY  AND  HEROES. 

On  Heroes,  Hero- Worship,  and  the  Heroic  in  History.  Six  Lectures,  reported  vrith 
Emendations  and  Additions,  by  Thomas  Carlyle,  Author  of  the  French  Revolution, 
Sartor  Resartus,  &c.  Elegantly  printed  in  bne  vol.  12mo.  Second  edition.  SI  00. 

iJ  A  masterly  production. — Even  the  sinele  lecture  to  which  we  shall  confine  our  office,  is,  we  feel, 
a  greater  theme  than  can  be  sufficiently  illustrated  at  our  hands.  We  have  elsewhere  n>tficed  a  new 
edition  of  Sartor  Resartus,  by  the  same  author.  It  is  a  very!  remarkable  work,  though  we  must  con- 
fess somewhat  too  Germau  and  transcendental  for  our  taste.  We  rejoice  to  say  that  we  find  no  such 
difficulties  besetting  us  in  these  disquisitions  on  heroes.  They  are  in  truth  philosophical  enough, 
abrupt  enough,  tearinsr  enough  ;  but  their  philosophy  is  clear,  distinct,  and  intelligible  ;  their  abrupt- 
ness is  the  vigour  of  Demosthenes :  their  tearing  the  acts  of  a  giant  who  has  a  wildsraess  to  b:;rst 
through  and  open  to  the  rest  of  mankind. 

4*  In  the  division  of  his  lalwurs.  the  author  considers  '.he  Hero  in  his  ancient  incarnations  as,  1.  A 
Divinity  ;  2.  A  Prophet  :  3.  A  Poet,  and  4.  A  Priest — quasi  Odin,  Mahomet.  Dante  and  Shakspeare, 
Luther  and  Knox,  and  latterly,  as  5.  A  Man  of  Letters;  and  6.  A  King — quasi  Johnson,  Rousseau, 
Burns.  Cromwell,  and  Napoleon.  It  is  to  the  fifth  of  these  Lectures  that  we  devote  our  attention.  Its 
exordium  is  original  and  splendid.  And  here  we  must  close  a  work — such  as  we  have  seldom  seen 
the  like  of,  and  one  which  redeems  the  literature  of  our  superficial  and  manufacturing  period.  It  is 
one  to  purify  our  natures,  expand  our  ideas,  and  exalt  our  souls.  Let  no  library  or  book-room  be  with- 
out it ;  the  more  :t  is  studied  the  more  it  will  bo  esteemed." — Literary  Gazette. 

A  SKETCH  OF  THE  LIFE  OF  PETER  VAN  S.CHAACK,  LL.D. 

Embracing;  Selections  from  his  Correspondence  and  other  "Writings  during  the 
American  Revolution,  and  his  Exile  in  England.  By  his  Son,  Henry  C.  Van 
Schaack.    One  handsome  volume,  Svo.    §2  50. 

■  This  work  forms  a  novel  contribution  to  the  history  of  the  American  RevoluKo*,  and  totally  un- 
iike  any  work  which  has  yet  appeared  on  that  subject.  It  presents  a  touching  picture  of  the  hardship* 
undergone  by  an  Amer.cau  of  elevated  character,  in  consequence  of  his  maintaining  a  neutrality  in 
the  revolutionary  war.  The  work  is  characterized  by  Mr.  Sparks,  the  African  historian,  "  as  not 
only  a  very  curious  and  interestiug  piece  of  biography,  but  a  valuable  contribution  to  the  history  of 
the  country  during  the  important  period  of  the  revolution." 


12 


History,  Biography,  cf-c. 


GUIZOTS  HISTORY  OF  CIVILIZATION. 

General  History  of  Civilization  in  Europe,  from  the  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  to 

the  French  Revolution*    Translated  from  the  French  of  M.  Guizot,  Professor  of 

History  to  la  Faculte  des  Lettres  of  Paris,  and  Minister  of  Public  Instruction*  Third 

American  edition,  with  Explanatory  Notes,  (adapted  for  the  use  of  Colleges  and 

High  Schools,)  by  C.  S.  Henry,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Philosophy  and  History  in  the 

University  of  the  city  of  New- York.  One  handsomely  printed  vol.,  12mo.  $1  00. 

•*'  We  hail  with  pleasure  the  republication  of  this  able  work.  It  is  terse  and  full,  and  adverts  *.o  the 
most  interesting  topic  in  the  social  relations  of  mankind,  the  progressive  improvement  of  the  European 
nations  from  the  overthrow  of  the  Roman  Empire  by  the  Goths,  and  Huns,  and  Vandals,  in  the  Fifth 
Century. 

"  The  work  of  M.  Guizot  comprehends  a  Course  of  Lectures  which  he  delivered,  and  which  con-1 
tain  the  spirit  of  Modern  History,  all  condensed,  into  a  focus,  to  illuminate  one  most  impressive  fea- 
ture in  the  annals  of  the  world.  A  concise  view  of  the  chief  themes  will  accurately  uufold  the  im- 
portance of  this  volume. 

"  The  introductory  lecture  is  devoted  to  a  discussion  of  the  general  subject  in  its  principles  ;  which 
is  followed  by  the  application  of  them  to  the  condition  of  European  Society. 

"  M.  Guizot  next  proceeds  to  develop  the  deranged  state  of  the  kingdoms  of  Europe,  after  the 
subversion  of  the  Roman  power,  and  the  subdivision  of  the  ancient  empire  into  distinct  sovereignties  ; 
which  is  followed  by  a  survey  of  the  feudal  system.  The  various  changes  and  civil  revolutions  of  the 
people  with  the  crusades,  the  conflicts  between  the  hierarchical  supremacy,  and  the  monarchical  and 
aristocratical  authorities  also,  are  developed  with  the  fluctuations  of  society,  through  their  combined 
tumultuous  collisions  ;  until  the  invention  of  printing,  and  the  maritime  discoveries  of  the  fifteenth 
century,  with  the  Reformation,  produced  a  convulsion,  whose  mighty  workings  still  are  exhibited,  and 
the  rich  fruits  of  which  constantly  become  more  plentiful  and  fragrant. 

"  The  two  lectures  which  close  the  series,  are  devoted  to  the  English  revolution  of  the  seventeenth, 
and  the  French  revolution  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

"  There  are  two  features  in  M.  Guizot's  lectures  which  are  as  attractive  as  they  are  novel.  One 
is,  the  lofty  moral  and  religious  principles  which  he  inculcates.  We  doubt  that  very  few  professors  ot 
history  in  our  own  country,  in  their  prelections,  among  their  students,  within  an  American  College, 
would  have  commingled  such  a  continuous  stream  of  the  best  ethics,  with  a  subject  avowedly  secular, 
as  If.  Guizot  has  incorporated  with  his  lectures  addressed  to  the  Parisian  infidels. 

"Another  is,  the  predominant  influence  which  he  has  attributed  to  Christianity,  in  effecting  the 
progressive  melioration  cf  European  society. 

"  To  the  friends  of  religious  freedom  especially,  M.  Guizot's  Lectures  on  Civilization  are  a  most 
acceptable  present  ;  because  they  are  not  the  result  of  a  controvertist's  endeavours  to  sustain  his  own 
opinions  in  a  polemical  conflict  with  an  adversary,  but  the  deliberate  judgment  of  an  impartial  ob- 
server, who  has  embodied  his  decisions  incidentally,  while  discussing  another  topic." — jY.  Y.  American. 

SCHLEGEL'S  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY. 

The  Philosophy  of  History,  in  a  course  of  Lectures  delivered  at  Vienna,  by  Frederick 

von  Schlegel,  translated  from  the  German,  with  a  Memoir  of  the  Author,  by  J.  B. 

Robertson.    Handsomely  printed  on  fine  paper.    2  vols.  12mo.    <$2  50. 

"If  there  be  »ne  book  not  professedly  religious  which  we  could  have  wished  republished  rat.heT  than 
another,  it  is  Frederick  Schlegel's  immortal  work.  No  other  work  of  the  kind,  we  venture  to  say, 
Jt  calculated  to  effect  so  much  good  among  the  reflecting  and  intellectual  portion  of  the  American 
public, — with  that  portion  capable  of  appreciating  the  pure  and  elevated  wisdom  of  the  '  Philosophy  of 
llistnry.'  We  do  not  at  present  intend  to  enter  into  anything  like  a  detailed  review  ;  it  is  quite  un- 
necessary to  do  more  than  direct  attention  to  a  work  which,  beyond  all  others,  has  contributed  to  exalt 
and  purify  modern  Science  and  Literature.  This  it  was  which  showed  the  world  of  the  nineteenth 
century  how  the  great  scheme  of  history  should  be  viewed, — on  man  and  his  relations  with  the  exter- 
nal world, — on  human  science  and  human  art,  refining  and  purifying  them  to  the  highest  point  of 
earthly  excellence."—  Truth  Teller. 

THE  LIFE  OF  ALEXANDER  HAMILTON. 

Edited  by  his  son,  John  C.  Hamilton.  2  vols.  8vo.  $5  00. 

"We  cordially  recommtnd  the  perusal  and  diligent  study  of  these  volumes,  exhibiting,  as  they  do, 
much  valuable  matter  relative  to  the  Revolution,  the  establishment  of  the  Federal  Constitution,  and 
other  important  events  in  the  uanals  of  our  cjuntry."— -Yew-  York  Review. 


History,  Biography,  Poetry,  <Jc 


13 


PICTORIAL  LIFE  OF  NAFOLEON. 

History  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  translated  from  the  French  of  M.  Laurent  de  L'Ar 
deche,  with  five  hundred  spirited  illustrations,  after  designs  by  Horace  Vernet,  and 
twenty  original  portraits  engraved  in  the  best  style.  Complete  in  two  handsome 
volumes,  octavo,  about  500  pages  each.    $5  00. 

This  Life  of  Napoleon,  which  is  now  offered  to  the  public,  is  composed  from  the  same  original 
authorities  as  those  consulted  by  previous  historians  and  biographers  ;  with  the  assistance,  also,  of 
the  substantive  works  of  the  latter,  and  of  all  important  works  since  published,  or  now  in  course  of 
publication.  From  careful  abstracts  and  references,  from  a  dispassionate  balancing  of  the  single  and 
collective  facts,  statements,  opinions  and  conjectural  probabilities,  occasionally  found  in  direct  opposi- 
tion among  authorities  of  equal  influence  and  validity,  the  author  has  sought  to  attain  a  fixed  equi- 
librium of  general  truth.  It  has  not  been  attempted  to  give  a  History  of  France  in  the  stormy 
time  of  the  Revolution,  or  in  the  successive  periods  of  the  Directory,  the  Consulate,  or  the  Empire 
The  violent  feelings  of  the  English  public  having  now  passed  away,  a  period  has  already  commenced  for 
the  exercise  of  a  temperate  judgment.  The  authorhas  also  endeavoured  in  t  to  forestall  time,  broach 
theories,  or  dispense  censure  or  praise.  The  deep-searching  and  far-spreading  investigations,  into 
which  an  attempt  to  form  an  opinion  concerning  the  consequences  and  results  of  his  actions  would  lead, 
could  not  be  undertaken  without  a  comprehensive  study  and  voluminous  exposition  of  the  moral  and 
political  world  and  its  various  mutations  ;  they  consequently  form  no  part  of  the  present  design. 

All  the  leading  journals  have  spoken  in  the  most  unqualified  praise  of  this  work.  The  following 
is  from  the  Boston  Traveller  : 

"  As  a  chaste,  condensed,  faithful,  and  accurate  memoir  of  the  Great  Captain,  it  is  worthy  of 
much  attention.  The  author  has  mainly  drawn  the  necessary  facts  of  his  history  from  the  letters, 
speeches,  manifestoes,  bulletins,  and  other  state  papers  of  Napoleon,  and  has  given  a  considerable 
number  of  these  in  his  text.  The  work,  in  this  respect,  is  not  unlike  the  design  of  many  memoirs  of 
Jess  distinguished  individuals,  who  are  made  to  tell  their  own  story  by  means  of  private  letters  and 
journals.  There  is  a  piquancy  and  force  about  this  manner  of  composing  details,  that  cannot  be  ob- 
tained in  any  other  way.  No  man  could  give  so  good  an  account  of  the  wonderful  exploits  of  Napoleon 
as  the  victor  himself  ;  and  his  language  is  often  not  less  comprehensive,  forcible,  and  sublime  than 
hifl  achievements  astonishing  and  vast.  Scott  pretended  to  find  in  them  bom!>ast ;  but  the  same  sen- 
tences which  he  condemned,  and  which  might  perhaps  seem  warm,  glowing,  and  often  exaggerated, 
to  a  cold  and  northern  fancy,  sent  a  thrill  through  all  the  millions  of  France,  and  aroused  that  terri- 
ble valour  which  bore  the  eagle  of  victory  triumphant  over  a  hundred  battle-fields,  and  placed  it  at 
last  on  the  towers  of  the  Kremlin  to  be  torn  and  broken  by  the  northern  tempest. 

The  work  is  superior  to  the  long  verbose  productions  of  Scott  and  Bourienne — not  in  style  alone,  bat 
hi  truth — being  written  to  please  neither  Charles  X.  nor  the  English  aristocracy — but  for  the  cause  of 
freedom.    It  has  advantages  over  every  other  memoir  extant." 

SOUTHEY'S   POETICAL  WORKS. 

The  Complete  Poetical  Works  of  Robert  Southey,  Esq.,  LL.D.  The  ten  volume 
London  edition  in  one  elegant  royal  8vo.  volume,  with  a  fine  portrait  and  vignette. 
$3  50. 

%*  This  edition,  which  the  author  has  arranged  and  revised  with  the  same  care  as  if  it  were  in- 
t-nded  for  posthumous  publication,  includes  many  pieces  which  either  have  never  before  been  coUected, 
or  have  hitherto  remained  unpublished. 

Preliminary  notices  are  affixed  to  the  long  poems, — the  whole  of  the  notes  retained, — and  such 
additional  ones  incorporated  as  the  author,  since  the  first  publication,  has  seen  occasion  to  insert. 

Contents. 

Joan  of  Arc.  ,  The  Curse  of  Kehama. 

Juvenile  and  Minor  Poems.  Roderick,  the  last  of  the  Goths. 

Thalaba  the  Destroyer.  The  Poet's  Pilgrimage  to  Waterloo. 

Madoc.  Lay  of  the  Laureate, 

Ballads  and  Metrical  Tales.        Vision  of  Judgment,  &c. 

"  At  (he  ape  of  sixty-throe  I  have  undertaken  to  collect  and  edit  my  poetic  il  works,  with  the  last  corrections  that  I  can  expect 
to  bestow  upon  litem.  They  have  obtained  u  reputation  equal  to  my  wishes.  ....  Thus  tocollect  and  revise  them  »  a  duty  whir'- 
lowe  to  tbi it  part  of  the  public  by  whom  they  have  been  auspiciously  received,  and  to  those  who  will  take  a  lively  concern  iu  my 
good  name  v,  hen  1  shall  have  departed.  "—Extract  from  Autlujr'n  Preface. 

14  The  critic  has  little  to  do  but  to  point  out  the  existence  of  the  work,  the  beauty  of  the  type  and  embellishments,  and  the 

cheapness  of  the  cost  ;  the  public  has  long  ago  acknowledged  its  merit  and  established  its  reputation  The  author  ofllte 

'  Lite  ot  Nelson'  must  live  as  long  as  our  history  and  language  en  hire.  Then  is  no  man  to  whom  the  latter  owes  a  greater  obli- 
gation—no  man  who  has  done  more  for  literature  by  his  genius,  his  labours,  and  his  life."—  Times. 

"  We  are.  very  glad  to  see  the  works  of  a  poet,  for  whom  we  have  always  fell  the  warmest  admiration,  collected,  and  in  a  shade 
which  will  ensure  their  popularity."—  Atlienceum. 

"  Southey 's  principal  poetical  works  have  been  lone  before  the  world,  extensively  read  and  highly  appreciated.  Their  appear- 
ance in  a  neat  and  uniform  edition,  with  the  final  corrections  of  the  auUior,  will  atl'orJ  unfeigned  pleasure  to  these  who  are 
'  married  to  immortal  verse.'  "—Literary  Gazette. 

"  The  beauties  of  Mr.  Southey  "s  poetry  are  such  that  this  edition  can  hardly  fail  to  find  a  place  in  the  library  of  every  mc» 
fond  of  elegant  literature."— hclcclic  Rroitu. 


14 


History,  Biography,  Poetry,  <fd. 


CABINET  EDITION  OF  THE  POETS. 

ELEGANTLY    PRINTED,   UNIFORM  IN   SIZE   AND    S  T  Y  L 

The  most  complete  portable  series  of  these  wall  known  authotfr  ever  published. 


CO W PER' S  COMPLETE   POETICAL  WORKS. 

The  complete  Foctical  Works  of  Wm.  Cowper,  Esq  ,  including  the  Hymns  ancf 
Translations  from  Mad.  Guion,  Milton,  &c,  and  Adam,  a  Sacred  Drama,  from  the 
Italian  of  Battista  Andrcini,  with  a  Memoir  of  the  Author,  by  the  Rev.  Henry 
Stebbing,  A.?vl.  One  elegantly  printed  volume  800  pages,  lGmo.  with  a  beautiful 
frontispiece.    $1  50. 

TAis  is  the  only  complete  edition  which  is  printed  in  one  volume. 
Morality  never  found  in  renins  a  more  devoted  advocate  than  Cowper,  nor  ha9  moral  wisdom,  in 
its  plain  and  severe  precepts,  been  ever  more  successfully  combined  with  the  delicate  spirit  of  poetry, 
than  in  his  works.  He  was  endowed  with  all  the  powers  which  a  poet  could  want  who  was  to  bo 
the  moralist  of  the  world — the  reprover,  but  not  the  satirist,  of  men — the  teacher  of  simple  truths, 
-which  were  to  be  rendered  gracious  without  endangering  their  simplicity. 

BURNS'   COMPLETE  POETICAL  WORKS. 

The  complete  Poetical  Works  of  Robert  Burns,  with  Explanatory  and  Glossarial 
Notes,  and  a  Life  of  the  Author,  by  James  Currie,  M.D.,  uniform  in  style  with 
Cowper.    $1  25. 

This  is  the  must  complete  edition  which  has  been  published,  and  contains  the  whole  of  the  poetry 
comprised  in  the  edition  lately  edited  by  Cuniiinsrham,  as  well  as  some  additional  pieces  ;  and  such 
notes  have  been  added  as  are  calculated  to  illustrate  the  manners  and  customs  of  Scotland,  so  as  to 
render  the  whole  more  intelligible  to  the  English  reader. 

*  He  owes  nothing  to  the  poetry  of  other  lands — he  is  the  offspring  cf  the  soil :  he  is  as  natural  to 
Scotlaud  as  the  heath  i3  to  her  hills — his  variety  is  equal  to  his  originality  ;  his  humour,  his  gaiety, 
his  tenderness  and  his  pathos,  come  all  in  a  breath  ;  they  come  freely,  for  they  come  of  their  own 
accord  ;  the  contrast  is  never  offensive  ;  the  comic  slides  easily  into  the  serious,  the  serio-03  into  the 
tender,  and  the  tender  into  the  pathetic." — Allan  Cunningham. 

"  No  poet,  with  the  exception  of  Shahspeare,  ever  possessed  the  power  of  exciting  the  most  varied 
and  discordant  emotions  with  sueh  rapid  transitions." — Sir  W.  Scott. 

MILTOISTS  COMPLETE  POETICAL  WCRKS. 

The  complete  Poetical  Works  of  John  Miltcn,  with  Explanatory  Notes  and  a  Life  of 
the  Author,  by  the  Rev.  Henry  Stebbing,  A.M.  Beautifully  Illustrated — uniform 
in  style  with  Cowper,  Burns,  and  Scott. 

The  Latin  and  Italian  Poems  are  included  in  this  edition. 
Mr.  Sfebbing's  notes  will  be  found  very  useful  in  elucidating  the  learned  allusions  with  which 

the  text  abounds,  and  they  are  also  valuable  for  the  correct  appreciation  with  which  the  writer  directs 

attention  to  the  beauties  ol  the  Author. 

SCOTT'S   POETICAL  WORKS. 

The  Poetical  Works  of  Sir  Walter  Scott,  Bart- — Containing  Lay  of  the  Last  Min- 
strel, Marmion,  Lady  of  the  Lake,  Don  Roderick,  Rokeby,  Ballads,  Lyrics,  and 
Songs,  with  a  Life  of  the  Author,  uniform  with  Cowper,  Burns,  &.c. 

"  Walter  Scott  is  the  most  popular  of  all  the  poets  of  the  present  day  and  deservedly  so.  He  de- 
Brribes  that  which  is  most  easily  and  generally  understood  with  inure  vivacity  and  etfect  than  auy 
other  writer.  His  style  is  clear,  flowing  and  transparent  ;  his  sentiments,  of  which  his  style  is  an 
easy  and  natural  medium,  are  common  to  him  with  his  readers.  He  selects  a  story  such  as  is  sure  to 
please,  full  of  incidents,  characters,  peculiar  names,  ccstume  and  scenery,  and  he  tells  it  in  away  that 
ran  offend  no  one.  He  never  wearies  or  disappoints  you.  Mr.  Scott  has  great  intuitive  power  ol 
feeling,  great  vividness  of  pencil  in  placing  external  objects  and  events  before  the  eye.  What  passes 
in  his  poetry  passes  much  as  it  would  have  done  in  reality."— Hazlitt. 


History,  Biography,  Poetry,  Travels,  Voyages,  <£c.  15 


THE  AMERICAN   IN  EGYPT; 

WITH  RAMBLES  THROUGH 

Arabia-Pctrcca  and  the  Holy  Land,  during  the  years  1839—10. 

BY  JAMES  E WING  COOLEY. 
illlustraied  with  numerous' Ctccl  Engravings,  alno  Etchings  and  Designs  by  Johnston,— one 
handsome  volume  octavo  of  610  pages.    Price  $2  50. 

No  other  volume  extant  can  give  the  readGr  so  true  a.  picture  of  what  he  would  he.  likely  to  sec 
and  meet  in  Etrvpt.  No  other  book  is  more  practical  and  plain  in  its  picture  of  precisely  what  the 
traveller  himself  will  meet.  Other  writers  have  one  account  to  give  of  their  journey  on  paper,  ami 
another  to  relate  in  conversation.  Mr.  Cooley  has  but  one  story  for  the  fireside  circle  and  the  printed 
}>a:;e. — Brother  Jonathan. 

Wo  have  read  the  greater  part  of  this  work  and  are  much  gratified  with  the  novelty,  raciness  and 
<>asy—  yet  dashing  style  w  ith  which  it  is  written.  Among  the  incidental  sketches,  the  story  of  Neddy 
Daaod,  a  kind-hearted  but  poor  American  who  could  not  subdue  his  inchuation  for  travel  in  foreign 
parts— is  beautifully  told.  The  entire  episode  is  full  of  nature,  feeling  and  pathos.  Indeed  the  pecu- 
hur  claim  of  the  writing  consists  in  its  being  the  evident  portraiture  of  fresh  and  vivid  impression  which 
it  leaves  upon  the  reader,  that  ho  soon  unconsciously  finds  himself  as  it  were  cue  of  the  travelling  party." 
— Philadelphia  Enquirer. 

We  do  not  hesitate  to  pronounce  it  the  most  interesting  work  on  Egypt  that  we  have  ever  met  with. 
Mr.  Cooley  seems  to  have  struck  out  in  an  entirely  new  pa^h  and  pursued  it  successfully.  Imbued 
with  a  rich  vein  of  humour,  and  possessed  of  keen  satirical  powers,  an  American  at  heart,  and  not  at 
all  intimidated  by  success,  there  is  a  freshness  of  style  and  easy  familiarity  of  manner  and  astern  in- 
dependence in  his  writiug  which  cannot  fail  to  please  as  well  as  to  instruct. — Brooklyn  Eagle. 

It  is  really  one  of  the  most  curious  and  interesting  books  that  has  made  its  appearance  fur  some 
time. — N.  Y.  Courier  Enquirer. 

Of  all  the  volumes  on  Egypt  that  have  yet  appeared,  this  work  of  Mr.  Cooley's  is  by  far  the  most 
attractive.  The  author  has  given  the  most  graphic  and  amusing  picture  of  life  in  Egypt,  as  it  pre- 
sents itself  to  the  American  traveller. — Baltimore  Patriot. 

TOUR   THROUGH    TURKEY   AND  PERSIA. 

Narrative  of  a  Tour  through  Armenia,  Kurdistan,  Persia,  and  Mesopotamia,  with  an 
Introduction  and  Occasional  Observations  upon  the  Condition  of  Mohammedanism 
and  Christianity  in  those  countries.    By  the  Rev.  Horatio  Southjratc,  Missionary 
of  the  American  Episcopal  Church.    2  vols.  12moM  plates.    §>2  50. 
An  exceedingly  interesting  book  of  Travels,  which  no  reader  will  be  very  likely  to  lay  by  for  good 
till  he  has  seen  the  end  of  it.     It  contains  a  vast  amount  of  information,  religious  and  general,  and  is 
written  in  a  style  of  perfect  ease  and  simplicity.     It  deserves,  and  we  douLt  not  will  gain,  an  exten- 
sive circulation. — Albany  Advertiser. 

SCOTLAND    AND   THE  SCOTCH; 

CR  THE  WESTERN  CIRCUIT. 
By  Catharine  Sinclair,  author  of  Modern  Accomplishments,  Modem  Society,  &c.  &c» 
1  vol.  12mo.    £>0  75. 

SHETLAND   AND   THE  SHETLANDERG; 

OR  THE  NORTHERN  CIRCUIT. 
By  Catharine  Sinclair,  author  of  Scotland  and  the  Scotch,  Holiday  House,  &c.  &c. 
1  vol.  12mo.  $0  87 1 

Miss  Sinclair  has  already  proved  herself  to.be  a  lady  of  high  talent  and  rich  cultivated  mind.  She 
thinks  with  precision  and  vigor,  and  she  possesses  the  quality  of  seizing  the  objects  of  her  thoughts  in 
\  ;ie  right  place  and  at  the  proper  time,  and  of  presenting  them  to  the  mind's  eye  of  her  readers,  in  the 
most  clear  and  captivating  light.  Her  style  is  characteristic  of  her  mind,  transparent,  piquant,  and 
lively,  yet  sustained  by  pure,  moral  and  religious  feeling. — New-York  American. 

THE   FLAG  SHIP; 

OR  A  VOYAGE  ROUND  THE  WORLD, 

In  the  United  States  Frigate  Columbia,  attended  by  her  consort,  the  Sloop  of  War  John  Adams,  and 
bearing  the  broad  pennant  of  Commodore  George  C.  Read.  By  Fitch  W.  Taylor,  Chaplain  to  tho 
Squadron.    2  vols.  12nio.,  plates.    $2  50. 

This  work  has  been  some  tune  before  the  public  ;  but  if  in  consequ?nce  of  our  lute  notice,  it  shall  afford  *.o  any  reader  the  very 
great  pleasure  and  profit  which  its  perusal  has  given  us,  we  are  sun;  he  will  think  it  beUerlate  limn  never.  The  records  effc 
voyage  round  the  world,  made  by  a  man,  who,  in  mingling  wiih  the  various  and  wonderful  scenes  it  must  present,  h.ts  had  h« 
ercpooeo,  could  not  fail  to  be  interestiiiK.  Facts  and  real  occurrences,  are  thinjs  of  which  we  never  prow  weary,  lint  (hi* 
work  hasa  lar  h'ghcr  claim  to  regard,  lis  literary  character  is  certainly  very  respectable,  and  the  benevolent  spirit  tfnd  Christian 
interest  with  which  the  varied  incidents  of  a  visit  to  almost  every  nation  on  the  globe  were  regarded,  pi^e  the  book  an  unwontM 
value-  The  ability  to  survey  the  mural  aspects  of  the  world,  is  a  qualification  of  which  the  far  greater  put  of  traveller.?  are  utterly 
deficient.  1'iobauly  since  the  valuable  journal  of  Tyermar ,  and  Bennett,  mere  has  been  no  other  one  published  which  exhibits 
to  satisfactory  a  view  of  the  Christina  missions  of  the  world  ostitis.  We  think  it  adapte1. 10  interest  i's  readers  not  only,  but  greatly 
to  instruct  Ibest,  and  especially  to  awaken  a  deep  and  livr.y  sympathy  for  tne  moral  waiusaud  miseries  ol  the  worli. — £vaft$iilUl. 


16      History,  Biography,  Poetry,  Voyages,  Travels,  fyc* 


THE   BOOK  OF  THE  NAVY; 

Comprising  a  general  History  of  the  American  Marine^  and  particular  accounts  of  all 
the  most  celebrated  Naval  Battles,  from  the  Declaration  of  Independence  to  the 
present  time,  compiled  from  the  best  authorities.  By  John  Frost,  Professor  of 
Belles  Lettres  in  the  High  School  of  Philadelphia.  With  an  Appendix  containing 
Naval  Songs,  Anecdotes,  &c.  Embellished  with  numerous  original  Engravings 
and  Portraits  of  distinguished  Naval  Commanders.  Complete  in  one  handsome 
volume  octavo.    $1  50.  •  * 

This  work  has  been  written  with  a  partfcu'lar  view  to  popular  entertainment  and  instruction.  To  re- 
mind the  people  that  the  Navy  is  the  right  arm  of  the  national  defence  ;  to  recall  the  glorious  actions  by 
•which  the  independence  of  the  country  was  asserted  in  the  days  that  tried  men's  souls  ;  to  revive  the  re- 
collection of  those  brilliant  exploits  on  the  ocean  in  that  war  with  France  of  which  the  battle  cry  was 
''Millions for  defence,  but  not  a  cent  for  tribute  ;"  to  display  those  gallant  achievements  in  defence  of 
"  Free  Trade  and.  Sailors'  Rights,"  which  taught  Britain  that  she  could  no  longer  claim  the  sovereignty  of 
the  seas  ;  and  to  exhibit  those  deeds  of  gallantry  by  which  the  barbarian  Tripolitans  and  Algerines  were 
taught  to  respect  the  Star-Spangled  Banner  ;  to  render  the  whole  of  this  brilliant  history  familiar  to  the 
recollections  of  the  people  as  household  words,  is  the  end  and  aim  of  the  BOOK  OF  THE  NAVY. 

Fully  sensible  that  delineation  is  more  effective  than  mere  description  and  narrative,  the  author  has 
embellished  the  vvork  with  forty-eight  splendid  Illustrations,  representing  the  most  celebrated  Naval 
Actions,  Portraits  of  distinguished  Commmanders,  naval  scenes,  and  exploits  of  every  description. 

The  object  being  to  increase  the  popularity  of  the  Navy  by  widely  diffusing  the  knowledge  of  its  glo- 
rious history  in  all  parts  of  the  country,  and  among  all  classes  of  people,  it  is  afforded  at  an  exceed- 
ingly low  price,  for  the  purpose  of  placing  it  in  the  hands  of  the  PEOPLE. 

"  This  is  the  only  popular  and  yet  authentic  single  view  which  wehave  of  the  naval  exploits  of  our 
country  arranged  with  good  taste  and  set  forth  in  good  language." — V.  S.  Gazette. 

"  This  is  just  such  a  work  as  has  long  been  wanted — a  history  of  the  Navy  sufficiently  condensed  for 
popular  use.  Mr.  Frost  has  performed  his  task  in  the  best  manner  and  has  produced  precisely  the  book 
that  was  desired." — Pennsylvanian. 

"  It  is  by  no  means  so  tedious  and  minute  as  Cooper's  Naval  History,  and  is  at  the  same  time  written 
in  a  style  every  way  equal  to  that  work." — N.  Y.  Aurora. 

"  It  is  a  faithful  account  of  the  origin  and  progress  cf  the  American  Navy,  of  its  exploits,  and  of  the 
character  of  those  who  have  done  it  honour.  There  are  fine  portraits  of  Perry,  Decatur,  and  M'Don- 
ough,  and  very  splendid  engravings  at  the  commencement  and  close  of  each  chapter." — N.  Y.Cour  §  Eng. 

"  The  literary  portion  of  the  work  is  a  faithful  record  of  those  glorious  naval  exploits  which  have  rein 
dered  our  flag  honoured  and  respected  by  every  nation  of  the  globe,  while  the  style  in  which  it  is  got 
up  and  its  splendid  embellishments  confsrthe  highest  credit  on  the  publishers."—  Boston  Times. 

"This  elegant  volume  is  dedicated  to  the  present  Secretary  of  the  Navy  and  is  altogether  a 
very  faithful  and  attractive  historical  record.  .  It  comprises  twenty-two  chapters,  detailing  the  promi- 
nent events  connected  with  the  naval  history  of  the  American  federal  republic.  To  the  narrative  is 
subjoined  an  appendix  of  seventy  pages  includiug  thirty-two  very  interesting  characteristic  anecdotes, 
nineteen  lyrical  poems,  and  a  minute  chronological  table  of  events  in  American  Naval  History.  It  is 
appropriately  adorned  with  steel  engraved  portraits,  numerous  vignettes,  and  full  page  representations 
of  various  conflicts.  The  Book  of  the  Navy  deserves,  and  will  doubtless,  have  a  very  extended  circu- 
lation."— National  Intelligencer. 


INCIDENTS  OF  A  WHALING  VOYAGE. 

To  which  is  added  Observations  on  the  Scenery,  Manners,  and  Customs,  and  Mis- 
sionary Stations  of  the  Sandwich  and  Society  Islands,  accompanied  by  numerous 
plates.    By  Francis  Allyn  Olmsted.     One  handsome  volume,  12mo.    $1  50. 

The  various  publications  before  the  public,  illustrating  our  marine  and  naval  history,  have  never, 
we  believe,  as  yet  entered  into  the  minutiae  of  a  whaling  voyage— a  whale  ship,  its  equipments,  dis- 
cipline, and  course  of  operations  in  the  internal  economy  and  varied  contingencies,— until  the  appear- 
ance of  the  present  volume,  by  one  who  has  some  pretensions  to  science,  both  in  the  philosophy  of  na- 
ture and  education.  The  work  indeed  only  presents  the  events  of  a  single  voyage,  but  is  blended  with 
so  much  of  incidental  history,  abounding  in  facts  relative  to  the  Islands  of  the  Pacific,  the  Missionary 
stations  there,  and  the  effects  of  civilization  upon  the  untutored  natives  of  the  South,  together  with 
the  illustrations  of  the  whale  fishery,  as  to  embody  a  mass  of  intelligence,  interesting  to  the  ordinary 
reader  as  well  as  to  the  philosophical  inquirer.  The  author  is  a  son  of  Professor  Olmsted,  of  Yale 
College,  who,  in  the  pursuit  of  health,  in  along  voyage,  has  noted  the  observations  to  which  we  refer. 
— N.  Y.  Courier. 


Arts,  Manufactures  and  Mines. 


IT 


A  DICTIONARY 

OF 

ARTS,  MANUFACTURES,  AND  MINES; 

Containing  a  clear  Exposition  of  their  Principles  and  Practice.  By  Andrew  Ure, 
M  D.,  F.R.S.,  &c.  &.c.  Illustrated  with  1241  Engravings,  and  containing  up- 
wards of  1400  closely  printed  pages. 

In  every  point  of  view  a  work  like  the  present  can  hut  be  regarded  as  a  benefit  done  to  theoretical 
and  practical  science,  to  commerce  and  industry,  and  an  important  addition  to  a  species  of  literature 
the  exclusive  production  of  the  present  century,  and  the  present  state  of  peace  and  civilization.  Criti- 
cisms in  favour  of  its  intrinsic  value  to  all  classes  of  the  community  might  be  produced  (if  space  would 
permit,)  from  upwards  of  three  hundred  of  the  leading  journals  in  Europe  and  this  country. 
The  following  is  from,  the  Democratic  Review. 

Wo  have  received  this  excellent  work  from  the  press  of  the  Messrs.  Appleton,  at  a  price  placing 
it  within  the  resell  of  the  thousands  to  whom  it  must  soon  become  a  book  of  absolute  necessity.  Of 
Dr.  Ure's  eminent  reputation  as  a  man  of  both  high  science  and  extensive  practical  experience  in  its 
application,  it  is  unnecessary  to  speak.  We  cannot  do  better  to  give  our  readers  an  idea  of  the  value 
of  the  work  we  desire  to  make  known  to  them,  than  place  before  them  the  following-  quotations  from 
the  author  s  Preface  : 

u  I  have  embodied  in  this  work  the  results  of  my  long  experience  as  a  Professor  of  Practical  Science. 
Since  the  year  1805,  when  I  entered  at  an  early  age  upon  the  arduous  task  of  conducting  the  schools 
of  chemistry  and  manufactures  in  the  Andersonian  Institution,  up  to  the  present  day.  I  have  been  as- 
siduously engaged  in  the  study  and  improvement  of  most  of  the  chemical,  and  many  of  the  mechanical 
arts.  Consulted  professionally  by  proprietors  of  factories,  workshops,  and  mines  of  various  descrip- 
tions, both  in  this  country  and  abroad,  concerning  derangements  in  their  operations,  or  defects  in  their 
products  ;  I  have  enjoyed  peculiar  opportunities  of  becoming  acquainted  with  their  minutest  details, 
and  have  frequently  had  the  good  fortune  to  rectify  what  was  amiss,  or  to  supply  what  was  wanting. 
Of  the  stores  of  information  thus  acquired,  I  have  availed  myself  on  the  present  occasion ;  careful, 
meanwhile,  to  neglect  no  means  of  knowledge  which  my  extensive  intercourse  with  foreign  nations 
affords. 

"  I  therefore  humbly  hope  that  this  work  will  prove  a  valuable  contribution  to  the  literature  of 
science,  serving — 

"  Iri  the  first  place,  to  instruct  the  Manufacturer,  Metallurgist,  and  Tradesman,  in  the  principles  of 
their  respective  processes,  so  as  to  render  them,  in  reality,  the  masters  of  their  business  ;  and,  to 
emancipate  them  from  a  state  of  bondage  to  such  as  are  too  commonly  governed  by  blind  prejudice 
and  a  vicious  routine. 

•'  Secondly.  To  afford  Merchants,  Brokers,  Drysalters,  Druggists,  and  Officers  of  the  Revenue,  cha- 
racteristic descriptions  of  the  commodities  which  pass  through  their  hands. 

Thirdly.  By  exhibiting  some  of  the  finest  (Ipvplnpaionto  of  Chemistry  and  Physics,  to  lay  open  an 
excellent  practical  school  to  students  of  these  kindred  sciences. 

"  Fourthly.  To  teach  Capitalists,  who  may  be  desiruu^  oi  puv,..,,  ~    

branch  of  industry,  to  select,  judiciously,  among  plausible  claimants. 

"  Fifthly.  To  enable  gentlemen  of  the  Law  to  become  well  acquainted  with  the  nature  of  those  pa- 
tent schemes  which  are  so  apt  to  give  rise  to  litigation. 

"  Sixthly.  To  present  to  Legislators  such  a  clear  exposition  of  the  staple  manufactures,  as  may  dis- 
suade them  from  enacting  laws,  which  obstruct  industry,  or  cherish  one  branch  of  it,  to  the  injury  of 

*^An£lastly  to  give  the  general  reader,  intent,  chiefly,  on  Intellectual  Cultivation,  views  of  many 
of  the  noblest  achievements  of  Science,  in  effecting  those  grand  transformations  of  matter  to  which 
Great  Britain  »r»d  the  United  States  owe  their  paramount  wealth,  rank,  and  power,  among  the  nations 
of  the  earth. 

Tl>e  latest  statistics  of  every  important  object  of  Manufacture  are  given  from  the  best,  and,  usu- 
ally from  official  authority,  at  the  end  of  each  article." 

"  The  mogt  complete  encyclopaedia  of  useful  science  that  has  ever  issued  from  the  press." — United 
Service  Gazette. 

'•  It  not  only  treats  of  the  application  of  chemistry  to  the  arts  and  manufactures,  but  it  also  enters  very 
fully  into  the  mechanical  arrangement  of  the  building,  the  plans,  and  implements  of  a  great  variety 
of  trades,  on  which  it  communicates  much  lucid  and  well-arranged  information.  It  is  compiled  with, 
great  care,  and  besides  containing  the  latest  materials,  is  strictly  confined  to  what  is  useful,  without 
superfluous  detail." — Civil  Engineer. 

"  Dr.  Ure's  reputation  precludes  the  necessity  of  our  saying  any  thing  in  proof  of  the  accuracy  and 
sterling  worth  of  this  publication.  It  is  designed  to  embody  the  results  of  his  long  experience  as  a 
professor  of  practical  science,  and  will  be  found  to  supply  a  mass  of  important  information  to  manu- 
facturers, engineers,  chemists,  and  other  numerous  classes.  It  is  drawn  up  in  a  style  at  once  exact 
and  popular,  and  is  so  well  illustrated  as  to  be  level  to  the  comprehension  of  the  generality  of  readers. 
As  a  book  of  reference  it  is  invaluable,  and  as  such  must  speedily  find  its  way  into  every  well-selected 
library." — Eclectic  Review. 

"  A  book  much  wanted.  It  contains  a  mass  of  information,  important  to  the  generality  of  readers, 
divested  of  the  difficulties  of  technicality,  and  the  pedantry  which  generally  confuses  and  deters  the 
aiere  common  sense  and  common-capacity  student." — Tunes. 


18  Hydraulics,  Mechanics,  Steam- Engine,  fyc. 

HYDRAULICS   AND  MECHANICS. 

A  Descriptive  and  Historical  Account  of  Hydraulic  and  othsr  Machines  for  Raising  Water,  including 
the  Steam  and  Fire  Engines,  ancient  and  modern  ;  with  Observations  on  various  subjects  connected 
with  the  Mechanic  Arts  ;  including  the  Progressive  Development  of  the  Steam  Engine  ■  Descrip- 
tions of  every  variety  of  Bellows,  Piston,  and  Rotary  Pumps,  Fire  Engines,  Water  Rams,  Pressure 
Engines,  Air  Machines,  Eolipiles,  &c.  Remarks  on  Ancient  Wells,  Air  Byds,  Cog  Wlieels,  Blow- 
pipes, Bellows  of  various  People,  Magic  Goblet.-,,  Steam  Idols,  and  other  Machinery  of  Ancient  Tem- 
ples. To  which  are  added  Experiments  on  Blowing  and  Spouting  Tubes,  and  other  original  De- 
vices, Nature's  modes  and  Machinery  lor  Raising  Water.  Historical  notices  respecting  Siphons, 
Fountains,  Water  Organs,  Clopsydne,  Pipes,  Valves,  Cocks,  &c.  In  five  books.  Illustrated  by 
nearly  three  hundred  Engravings.  By  Thomas  Ewbank.  One  handsomely  printed  volume  of 
six  hundred  pages.    $3  50. 

Although  the  subject  of  this  work  may  present  nothing  alluring  to  the  general  reader,  it  will  be  found  not  destitute  of 
interest  to  the  philosopher  and  intelligent  mechanic.  The  ai  t  of  raising  water  has  ever  been  closely  connecied  with  the 
progress  of  man  in  civilization,  30  much  so,  indeed,  that  the  state  of  this  art  among  a  people  maybe  taken  as  an  index  of 
cheir  position  on  the  scale  of  refinement.  It  is  also  art  art,  which,  from  its  importance,  called  forth  the  ingenuity  of  man 
In  the  infancy  of  society,  nor  is  it  improbable  that  uori&-inatsd  some  of  the  simple  machines  of  mechanic  powers  them- 
selves. 

It  was  a  favourite  subject  of  research  with  eminent  mathematicians  and  engineers  of  old,  and  the  labour  of  their  suc- 
cessors in  modern  days,  have  been  rewarded  with  the  mo3t  valuable  machine  which  the  arts  ever  presented  to  man,  the 
STEAM  ENGINE,  for  it  was  "  raising  of  water,"  that  exercised  the  ingenuity  of  Decatus  and  V/ orcester,  Morland  and 
Papin,  Savary  and  Newcomen,  and  those  illustrious  men  whose  successive  labours  developed  and  matured  tiiat 
'*  semi-omnipotent  engine,"  which  "  draweth  up  water  by  fire."  A  machine  that  has  already  changed  and  immeasura- 
bly improved  the  state  of  civil  society,  and  one  which,  in  conjunction  with  the  printing  press,  is  destined  to  renovate  both 
the  political  and  the  moral  world.  The  subject  is  therefore  intimately  connected  with  the  present  advanced  state  of  the 
arts ;  and  the  amazing  progress  made  in  them  during  the  last  two  centuries  may  be  attributed  in  some  degree  to  its  culti- 
vation.— '—  Vide  Preface. 

"  This  work  of  Mr.  Ewbank  seems  to  be  something  new  in  its  design,  which  is  effected  with  wonderful  ability  and  success 
It  could  only  have  been  written  by  one,a  large  portion  of  whose  life  had  been  spent  in  searching  the  dusty  volumes  of  an- 
tiquity, and  who  possessed  besides  an  ardent  eiuh-vixsm  in  the  cause  of  science  and  mechanic  improvement.  '  We  have 
not  time  to  give  anything  like  a  general  summary  of  its  contents.  It  traces  the  history  of  machinery  of  all  sorts  from  the 
very  earliest  dawn  of  its  invention — exploring  with  the  most  ceaseless  assiduity  the  records  of  antiquity,  and  cross  exam- 
ining their  traditions,  cus;oms,  &>c.  with  consummate  skill,  intermingling  the  whole  with  the  most  entertaining  sketchos 
of  life  and  character  and  the  most  just  and  instructive  reflections  upt.!»  the  features  of  society  and  ordinary  life,  which  are 
indicated  by  the  habita  thus  brought  to  light.  The  work  is  divided  into  five  book3,  of  which  the  general  subjects  are  as 
follows:  1.  Primitive  and  Ancient  Devices  for  .Raising'  Water :  2.  Machines  for  Raising  Water  by  the  Pressure  of  the 
Atmosphere:  3.  Machines  for  R-aising  Water  by  Compressive  independently  of  Atmospheric  influence  :  4.  Machines  for 
Raising  Water,  chiefly  of  Modern  Ongin,  including  early  modern  applications  of  steam  for  that  purpose  :  5.  Novel  De- 
vices for  Raising  Water,  with  an  account  oi  syphons,  locks,  valves,  clopsydis,  &.c.  it  is  illustrated  by  nearly  300  tine  en- 
gravings, and  is  published  in  the  finest  style  of  the  typographic  art.—  Tribune." 

"  This  is  a  highly  valuable  production,  replete  with  novelty  and  interest,  and  adapted  to  gratify  equally  the  historian, 
the  philosopher  and  the  mechanician,  being  the  result  of  a  protracted  and  extensive  research  among  the  arcana  of  histori- 
an and  scientific  literature." — National  Intelligencer. 

HODGE   ON    THE  STEAM-ENGINE. 

The  Steam  Engine,  its  Origin  and  Gradual  Iinptove-ment,  from  the  time  of  Hero  to  the  present  day, 
as  adfr-V.ed  to  Manufactures,  Locomotion  aiul  Navig^ti^  iu„.,«^i  _;tk  fo-tj-  oiff>>t  Platca  in  full 
8vo7"'$12  6oV  '        "y  Uod&>  C-E-     1  vol.  folio  of  plates,  and  letter-press  m 

ml^ai^^t™^^11^  a  compressive  history  of  the  invention  and  the  various  im- 

££%2TriA  In  ^^nT^  '?  thV'eam-engine,from  the  earllest  Period  to  the  present  time, 
together  with  such  practical  tulos  and  explanations  a,  ure  necessary  to  enable  the  mechanic  to  de<i-n 
and  construct  a  machine  of  any  requ.red  power  and  of  the  most  unproved  form,  for  any  of  he  nu  ,  er- 
ous  applications  of  steam  For  the  purpose  of  rendering  the  reference  from  Ihe  'etter-press  o  the 
plates  more  convenient,  the  engraved  illustrations  are  published  in  a  separate  vol urne ^  "he  foli« 
iorm.  lhese  plates  are  all  drawn  to  certain  scales,  and  the  dimensions  of  every  p:irf  IO'w  }*»  taken 
and  machines  built  from  any  of  the  designs.  ' 

H  The  most  recent  and  approved  engines  of  their  respective  classes  appear  to  have  been  selected, 
and,  with  four  exceptions  only,  are  ali  of  American  construction  and  arrangement.  The  volume  of 
plates,  as  a  work  of  the  art  of  drawing,  forms  one  of  the  most  splendid  specimens  that  has  ever  fallen 
under  our  observation.  Mr.  Hodge,  the  author  of  this  truly  practical  and  valuable  work,  is,  it  will  be 
recollected,  the  inventor  of  the  steam  fire-engine,  the  utility  of  which,  in  extinguishing  fires,  has  been 
fully  tested." — Courier  $  Enquirer. 

LAFEVERS    MODERN  ARCHITECTURE. 

Beauties  of  Modern  Architecture:  consisting  of  forty-eight  plates  of  Original  Designs,  with  Plans, 
Elevations  and  Sections,  also  a  Dictionary  of  Technical  Terms  ;  the  whole  forming  a  complete 
Manual  for  the  Practical  Builder.    By  M.  Lafever,  Architect.    1  vol.  large  8 vo.  half  bound.  $6  00 

LAFEVER'S   STAIR-CASE   AND    HAND-RAIL  CONSTRUCTION. 

The  Modern  Practice  of  Stair-case  and  Hand-rail  Construction,  practically  explained,  in  a  series  of 
Designs.  By  M.  Lafever,  Architect.  With  Plans  and  Elevations  for  Ornamental  Viliafc.  F»fie«» 
Plates.    I  vol.  large  8vo.    $3  00. 

The  works  of  Lafever  are  pronounced  by  the  practical  man  to  be  the  most  useful  over  published. 


Biography,  Education,  §*c. 


19 


MRS.  AUSTIN'S  GERMAN  WRITERS. 

Fragments  from  German  Prose  Writers,  translated  by  Mrs.  Austin.    Illustrated  with  Biographical  and 

Critical  Notes.    \  vol.  12mo.    Elegantly  printed  on  fine  white  paper.  $125. 

"  The  choice  of  these  passages  has  been  determine']  by  considerations  as  various  as  their  character  and  their  subjects.  In  son* 
ft  was  the  value  of  the  matter,  in  others  the  beauty  of  Ike  firm  thai  struck  mc  ;  in  some  the  vigorous,  unaffected  good  sense,  in 
others  the  fantastic  and  mystical  charm.  Some  recalled  familiar  trains  of  thought,  which  meet  us  in  a  foreign  literature  like  old 
4-ieuds  in  a  idjcounlry,  others  altogether  new  and  strange." — Preface. 


THE   DAUGHTERS  OF  ENGLAND: 

Their  Position  in  Society,  Character,  and  Responsibilities.    By  Mrs.  Ellis,  author  of  "  The  Women  of 
England."    Complete  in  one  handsome  volume  12mo.    75  cents. 

"  Amiable  and  holy  are  these  lessons,  calculated  to  elevate  and  purify  the  young  hearlsin'.o  which  they  may  be  received,  and  te 
•any  those  best  blessings  of  love  and  peace  into  many  a  family.  Airs.  Ellis  is  not  a  steru  moralist,  who  frightens  with  her  seve- 
rity, bnt  a  winnin;  instructress  to  whom  it  is  sweet  to  listen. 

"  This,  her  last. "is  also  her  best  bock.  Its  purity,  its  morality,  its  intesrity.  are  all  unblemished  ;  and  no  parent  or  friend  can 
plac-  a  book  likely  to  be  followed  by  more  worthy  impressions,  in  the  hands  of  any  of  the  Daughters  of  England."—  The  Metre, 
politan  Magazine. 

"We  arj  indebted  to  the  publishers  for  an  elegant  volume,  and  to  the  author  for  a  work  ahoundine  in  excellent  sentiment 
elothed  in  rich  language;  and  we  commend  the  book  as  adapted  lo  instruct,  and  elevate  and  adorn  the  daughters  of  America  as 
well  as  of  the  moih*r  country.  Mrs.  Ellis  addresses  herselt  to  young  ladies  who  profess  to  believe  the  reiieion  ol  the  Bible,  and 
sels  before  them  their  high  responsibilities  in  a  light  thai  commands  attention  and  secures  conviction.  "—JXcw-  York  Observe/  . 


HOME  EDUCATION. 

By  Isaac  Taylor,  author  of  "  Natural  History  of  Enthusiasm,"  &c.  &c.    Second  edition.    1  vol. 

12mo.    $1  00. 

In  this  volume  the  general  principles  of  Education,  as  applicable  to  private  families  and  to  small  schools,  are  stated  and  ex- 
plained ;  such  methods  of  treatment,  especially,  being  suggested  as  are  best  suited  lo  the  circumstances  of  a  country  residence  ; 
at  the  same  time,  hints  are  offered  of  a  kind  lo  be  available  under  any  circtim  stances  for  carrying  on  the  culture  of  those  of  the 
intellectual  faculties  thai  are  the  earliest  developed,  and  on  the  due  expansion  of  which  the  force  and  effic.ency  of  the  mature 
mind  uepend. 

*'  A  very  enlightened,  just,  and  Christian  view  of  a  most  important  subject."— ^raeriean  Biblical  Repository. 

PHYSICAL  THEORY  OF   ANOTHER  LIFE. 

By  Isaac  Taylor,  author  of     Natural  History  of  Enthusiasm."     Third  Edition.    1  vol.  12mo. 

S7£  cents. 

One  of  the  most  learned  cud  extraordinary  works  of  modern  limes. 

THE   PRINCIPLES   OF  DIAGNOSIS. 

Sweet.    1  vol.  8vo.    §2  00. 

This  work  was  published  in  accordance  with  some  of  the  most  celebrated  physicians  of  this  country,  who  were  anxious  th*t  it 
should  be  brought  uilhin  the  reach  of  all  classes  of  medical  men,  lo  whose  attention  it  offers  strong  claims  as  the  latest  and  be* 
work  on  the  subject,  and  as  being  calculated  to  Jill  a  blank  in  the  medical  library,  the  existence  of  which,  hitherto,  has  bee» 
generally  admitted  and  deplored. 

DISCOURSES  ON  THE  NERVOUS  SYSTEM. 

Select  Discourses  on  the  Functions  of  the  Nervous  Sj'stem,  in  opposition  to  Phrenology,  Materialism 

and  Atheism  ;  to  which  is  prefixed  a  Lectirre  on  the  Diversities  of  the  Human  Character,  arising 

from  Physiological  Peculiarities.    By  John  Augustine  Smith,  M.D.    1  vol.  12mo.    75  cents. 

"  The«e  Discourses  form  part  of  a  course  annually  attended  by  the  students  of  the  College  of  Physicians  and  Surgeons,  and 
being  adapted  to  a  general  audience,  were  received  with  favour.  Recourse  has  now  been  had  to  the  Press,  in  the  hepu,  dial  a 
perusual  of  the  Lectures  may  gratify  some  lovers  of  science,  by  whom  they  could  not  be  heard." — Preface. 

LIMITATIONS    OF    HUMAN  RESPONSIBILITY. 

By  Francis  Wayiand,  D.D.    Second  Edition,  1  vol.  18mo. 

ARTHUR  CARRYL; 

A  Novel.  By  the  author  of  the  "  Vision  of  Rubeta."  Cantos  First  and  Second.  Odes,  Heroic  and 
Errotic  ;  Epistles  to  Milton,  Pope,  Juvenal,  and  the  Devil;  Sonnets;  Epigrams;  Parodies  of  Ho- 
race ;  England — as  she  is  ;  and  other  Poems  ;  by  the  same  author.  1  vol.  rcyal  12mo.  elegantly 
printed.    $2  00. 

•*'  We  do  not  hesitate  in  saying,  that  there  is  more  of  genuine  poetry  throughout  the  pages  of  '  Arthur  Carry  1,'  than  any  other 
vcc.'i  Lnal  lias  croic  under  our  notice  for  eoaia  time. " — BosL  Morn.  Post. 


20 


Poetry^  History^  fyc* 


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GOLDSMITH  . — THE  VICAR  OF  WAKEFIELD.   By  Oliver  Goldsmith.    87*  cenU. 

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PICTORIAL   ROBINSON  CRUSOE. 

The  Life  and  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe     By  Daniel  De  Foe.    With  a  Memoir  of  the  Author, 

and  an  Essay  on  his  Writings,  illustrated  with  nearly  500  spirited  Engravings,  by  the  celebrated 

French  artist,  Grandville,  forming  one  elegant  volume,  octavo,  of  500  pages.    $2  50. 

"  Was  there  ever  anythine  written  by  mere  man  that  the  reader  wished  longer,  except  Robinson  Crusoe,  Don  Qnixotte,  and 
the  Pilgrim's  Progress?"— 2>r.  Johnson.  _ 
"  How  happy  that  th;s,  the  most  mora]  of  romances,  u  not  only  the  most  charming  of  books,  but  the  most  instructive." — A. 

Chalmers. 

"  No  fiction  in  any  language  was  ever  better  supported  than  these  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe."—  Dr.  Alnir. 
"Crusoe  has  obtained  a  ready  passport  to  the  mansions  of  the  rich,  and  the  cottages  of  the  poor,  and  communicated  equal  de- 
lurhutAaJl, tanks  and  clasps  of  the  community. ,  Few  works  have  been  more  generally  read,  or  more  justly  admired  ;  few 

"  The  Messrs.  Appleton  &  Co.,  of  New- York,  have  just  published  a  beautiful  edition  of  'The  I-ife  and  Adventures  of 
Robinson  Crusoe.'  Not  the  miserable  abridgment  generally  circulated,  but  De  Foe's  genuine  work,  Robinson  Crusoe  in  full 
and  at  length,  a  story  which  never  pal's  upon  the  reader,  and  never  can  lose  its  popularity  while  the  English  language 
endures.    This  elegant  edition,  which  also  gives  an  interesting  memoir  ot  Daniel  De  Foe,  and  an  essay  upon  his  writings, 

illustrated  with  nearly  five  hundred  admirably  executed  wood  engravings,  by  the  celebrated  French  artut  Grandville,  the 
■.vhole  being  compressed  into  an  octavo  volume  of  about  five  hundred  pages.  Without  Robiuson  Crusoe,  the  domestic 
library  seems  incomplete— it  has  a  never  failing  charm  both  for  the  young  and  the  old.  Apart  from  the  intense  interest 
which  De  Foe  always  gives  to  his  narrative,  he  is  one  of  those  masters  of  composition  who  cannot  be  too  carefully  studied 
by  those  who  aspire  to  simplicity  and  strength." — Pennsyhanian. 


PICTORIAL    VICAR    OF  WAKEFIELD. 

The  Vicar  of  Wakefield.    By  Oliver  Goldsmith.    Elegantly  illustrated  with  nearly  200  Engravings, 

making  a  beautiful  volume,  octavo,  of  about  350  pages.    $1  75. 

"  We  love  to  turn  back  over  these  rich  old  classics  of  our  own  language,  and  rej  ivinate  ourselves  by  the  never -failing 
associations  which  a  re-perusal  always  calls  up.  Let  any  one  who"  has  not  read  this  immortal  tale  for  fifteen  or  twenty 
years,  try  the- experiment,  and  we  will  warrant,  that  he  rises  up  from  the  task — thepleasur;  we  should  have  said— u  happier 
and  a  better  man 

"  In  the  good  old  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  all  is  pure  gold  without  dross  or  alloy  of  any  kind.  This  much  we  have  said  to 
our  last  generation  readers.  This  edition  of  the  work,  however,  we  take  it,  was  got  up  for  the  benefit  of  the  rising  genera- 
tion, and  we  really  envy  cur  young  friends  the  pleasure  which  is  before  such  of  them  as  will  read  it  for  the  first  time.  We 
have  a  perfect  recollection  of  the  very  seat  we  occupied  while  perusing  it.  So  vivid  was  the  impression,  that,  like  the 
•daguerreotype,  every  surrounding  object  (besides  the  picture  designed  to  be  impressed.)  was  stereotyped  tor  ever  in  the 
memory,  ifow  often  the  same  colours  and  (inures  have  moved  through  other  scenes,  in  new  phases  and  altitudes,  we 
knovi-  not,  nor  do  we  wish  to  k'now,  lest  we  might  disturb  that  blessed  picture  gallery  of  ours,  which  has  served  us  a»  are- 
source  through  so  many  weary  days  and  nights, "and  which  no  artist  helped  to  adorn  for  us  more  than  Oliver  Goldsmith. 

"There  is  one  thing  which  struck  us  very  forcibly  upon  the  repcrutal—  it  is  the  facility  with  which  Goldsmith  transfuse 
a  portion  of  his  own  experience  into  every  character.  To  the  old  parson's  son  he  assigns  the  pedestrian  tour— to  Utirchell  his 
own  slovenly  habits  and  literary  tastes,  and  so  on,  through  all  the  dra7iiaiis  persona—  in  each  one  an  occasional  glimpse  of 
Ins  own  peculiar  habits  and  modes  of  thought,  may  be  detected. 

"  This  book,  with  its  beautiful  illustrations  and  gilt  binding,  will  make  an  appropriate  present — and  surely  no  one  has  a  bet- 
ter riebt  to  be  held  in  affectionate  remembrance  round  a  happy  fire-side  than  Goldsmith— the  gentle,  die  kind- hearted,  but 
uufortunale  Goldsmith."— Savannali  Republican. 


21 


Now  in  Course  of  Publication,  in  Monthly  Parts,  12J  cents  each, 

WITH  ILLUSTRATIONS  BY  DICK  KITCAT, 

THE  FORTUNES  OF  HECTOR  O'HALLORAN, 

AND  HIS  MAN  MARK  ANTONY  OTCOLE. 
By  W.  H.  MAXWELL,  Esq. 
"  Let '  Harry  Lorrequer,'  alias  '  Charles  O'Malley,'  alias  '  Jack  Hintor.,'  tremble  for  hi3  popularity, 
as  a  formidable  rival,  in  the  person  of  4  Hector  O'Halloran,'  has  entered  boldly  into  the  lists,  deter- 
mined to  divide  with  him  his  empire  over  the  affections  of  an  Irish  public.  The  story  is  well,  simply, 
and  happily  opened,  in  an  old  castle  on  the  wild  coast  of  Donegal,  and  in  the  troubled  year  of  our 
Lord,  1795 — a  year  when  gentlemen  wearing  white  shirts  took  especial  delight  in  paying  nocturnal 
visits  to  mansions  suspected  of  possessing  private  armories.  Our  hero  is  the  son  of  a  true  soldier,  one 
who  smelt  powder,  arid  saw  bullets  fly;  and  before  the  31st  page  closes,  he  sets  off  for  the  camp 
himself  and, — but  no,  we  shall  not  betray  what  happened  to  him  on  the  way,  as  the  legitimate 
curiosity  of  the  reader  may  be  gratified  at  the  small  expense  of  One  Shilling.  It  would  be  quite 
absurd  were  we  to  offer  any  comment  on  the  style  of  the  gifted  author  of  the  1  Stories  of  Waterloo.' 
It  would  be  'to  paint  the  lily,' — the  quotation  is  old,  but  the  application  is  happy  in  this  instance." — 
CorJfc  Examiner. 

"  Faugh-a-Ballagii,"  is  the  celebrated  and  characteristic  Irish  motto,  meaning 'clear  the  way  !'  It  is 
a  bold  undertaking,  that  on  which  Mr.  Maxwell  has  ventured,  of  flinging  down  the  glove  of  rivalry 
straight  at  the  feet  of  the  author  of  Charles  O'Malley  :'  but  he  has  done  so  boldly  and  bravely.  He  has 
brought  forward  on  his  stage  a  young  Irishman,  who  seems  to  be  the  full  incarnation  of  the  wild  and 
warm  genius  of  his  country  t  he  has  given  him  a  body-guard  to  match,  and  a  commission  in  the  twen- 
ty-first Fusileers ;  and  has  fairly  started  him  forth  on  the  world  as  a  soldier  of  fortunp,  which  in 
general,  as  we  need  not  be  told,  signifies  in  Ireland,  as  everywhere  else,  a  soldier  of  no  fortune.  The 
first  five  numbers,  all  that  have  yet  appeared,  promise  capitally  for  the  sequel ;  and  though  we  took 
them  up  with  a  pshaw  !  of  impatience  at  having  to  read  them  for  an  opinion  alxmt  them,  we  intend  to 
read  the  future  ones  as  fast  as  they  come  out,  for  their  own  sake,  for  the  fun  that  is  in  them." — 
Democratic  Review. 

Noio  in  course  of  Publication,  in  Monthly  Parts,  12|  cents  each,  with  Illustrations, 

by  the  Author, 

"HANDY  ANDY." 

By    SAMUEL    LOVER,  Esq* 

"  This  boy  Handy  will  be  the  death  of  us.  What  is  the  police  force  about  to  allow  the  uttering  of 
application  that  has  already  brought  us  to  the  brink  of  apoplexy  fifty  times  ?  Grave  people,  under- 
takers, sextons  and  the  like,  may,  perhaps  read  with  impunity.  Such  may  laugh  over  it,  but  let  a 
fellow  with  a  squeeze  of  natural  fun  in  him,  venture  to  peruse  it,  and  we'll  lay  ten  to  one  it  throws 
him  into  convulsions. — SportingReview. 

"  We  fael  indebted  to  the  Publishers,  not  only  for  the  book,  but  for  the  hearty  laugh  we  have  had 
over  it.  Our  sides  fairly  ache  from  the  effect,  as  bad  as  even  the  unfortunate  Trumpeter's  did  from 
over  straining,  or  O'Grady's  kicking.  Any  one  afflicted  with  the  blues,  will  find  a  sovereign  remedy  in 
Handy  k  ndy." — Brooklyn.  News.  , 

"  The  fata'.ity  which  attends  every  thing  to  which  Handy  puts  his  hand,  is  not  only  excessively 
droll,  but  higAly  dramatic,  without  treading  upon  natural  conduct  and  its  natural  results.  Unlike 
other  folks,  his  very  blunders  will  make  his  course  prosperous  ;  for  who  that  can  read  would  be  without 
so  entertaining  acompanion  as  Handy  Andy." — Literary  Gazette. 

44  The  richest,  the  raciest,  and  the  most  frolicking  Irish  story  wo  have  ever  perused." — London 
Journal  of  Commerce. 

'•  The  history  of  Handy  Andy  promises  to  present  a  particular  and  faithful  account  of  one  of  the 
'cutest  Paddies  that  ever  made  use  of  his  fists." — United  Service  Gazette. 

"  We  trust,  for  many  a  succeeding  month,  to  grasp  the  extended  hand  of  our  friend  Andy,  and  each 
time  with  renewed  pleasure."—  Sunday  Times. 

"  Handy  Andy  is  the  name  of  a  new  periodical  by  Mr.  Lover,  the  author  of  '  Rory  O'More,'  and  one 
of  the  admirable  Crichtons  of  the  day.  Poet,  painter,  dramatist,  musician,  novelist,  and  orator  ;  he 
Mas  woh  i  reputation  which  thi»new  production  is  likely  to  increase."— Salopian  Journal. 


22  '     Juvenile  Books. 

WORKS    FOR    THE  YOUNG. 


A    LIBRARY   FOR    MY   YOUNG  COUNTRYMEN. 

Thjs  Library  is  confided  to  the, editorial  care  of  one  of  the  most  successful  writers  of  the  day,  and 
commends  itself  as  presenting  to  the  readers  of  this  country  a  collection  of  books,  chiefly  confined  to 
American  subjects  of  historical  interest. 

The  young  reader,  who  is  interested  in  tales  and  stories  of  adventure,  will  find  in  these  volumes  all 
the  incident  and  daring  of  the  most  thrilling  romance,  while  they  will  contain  faithful  records  of  his^ 
torical  truths. 

As  thi3  enterprise  is  left  to  the  entire  care  of  the  editor,  who  will  admit  none  but  the  best  and  most 
useful  books,  it  is  believed  they  will  better  deserve  the  patronage  of  the  public,  than  most  collection 
left  to  the  speculation  of  publishers. 

They  pledge  themselves  that  no  pains  shall  be  spared  to  make  this  collection  more  really  valuable 
than  any  yet  published,  to  be  printed  on  good  paper,  clear  type,  and  strong  binding,  embellished  Witk 
plates,  and  offered  at  the  very  low  price  of'37i  cents  per  volume. 

The  following  volumes  are  noio  ready. 
THE  LIFE  AND  ADVENTURES  OF   HENRY  HUDSON.     By  the  author  of  "  Uncle 

Philip's,"  "  Virginia,"  &c. 

ADVENTURES  OF  CAPTAIN  JOHN  SMITH;   Founder  of  Virginia.    By  the  author  of 

"  Henry  Hudson,"  &c. 

DAWNINGS  OF  GENIUS.  By  Anne  Pratt,  author  of  "  Flowers  and  their  Associations,"  &c. 
LIFE  AND  ADVENTURES  OF  HERMAN  CORTES.    By  the  author  of  the  "Adventures  of 

Captain  John  Smith,"  &c. 

ZH7  Several  other  volumes  are  in  immediate  preparation. 

EVENINGS  WITH   THE  CHRONICLERS; 

Or  Uncle  Rupert's  Tales  of  Chivalry.    By  R.  M.  Evans.    With  many  Illustrations.    1  fSL  l&no., 
elegantly  bound.    $0  75. 

«•  This  prould  have  been  a  volume  after  our  own  h«arts,  while  we  were  vounsrer,  and  it  is  scarcely  less  so  now  when  we 
*re  ecmewhst  older.  It  discourses  of  thoss  things  which  charmed  aH  of  us  tn  early  youth.  The  derin«-  dead's  of  the 
Knights  aiul  Squires  of  feudal  warfare.  The  true  version  of  the  'Chevy  Cha«e,'  the  exploits  of  the  siout  and  stalwari 
Warriors  ol  England,  Scotland  and  Germany.  Ina  word,  it  is  an  attractive  book,  ami  rendered  more  so  to  vcnin^-  readers 
by  a  series  nf  wood  engravings,  beautifully  executed,  illustrating  the  letter-r.rees  descriptions.  There  are  seventeen  of 
ihese  plates  in  the  volume,  and  ilie  whole  bock  is  so  excellently  printed,  and  upon  such  goud  paper,  that  it  is  in  all  re- 
elects valuable."—  Courier  Sf  Enquirer. 

THE   HISTORY   OF  JOAN    OF  ARC. 

By  R.  M.  Evans,  author  of  "  Evenings  with  the  Chroniclers,"  with  t<venty-four  elegar,i  illustration*. 
1  vol.  J6mo.     Extra  gilt.    $0  73. 

"Tiie  inciJent  upon  which  this  work  is  founded ,  is  one  of  the  most  in'eres'injr  and  remai  (cable  that  his'orv  lias  pre- 
served to  n>-.  Thai  a  young  ;r:rt  from  the  humblest  warts  of  life,  incapable  of  writing  Irer  name,  or  even  readme  it  when 
n  was  v.  i  it  ten,  and  trained  only  to  the  most  servile  drudgery,  should,  under  a  fanatical  impulse,  have  iveloped  an  en- 
ei-'y  o!  c  ,a:acerth:il  made  her  tor  some  time  the  terror  of  one  nation  and  the  pride  of  rum  h,,-,  -x-  should  hnvepronoanc- 
ed  impossible,  :t  a  well-authenticated  record  of  the  fact  had  nor  come  down  to  us.  lit  the  work  before  us  we  have  ne: 
only  a  most  interesting  biography  of  this  female  prodigy,  including  what  she  wws  an  1  wont  she  accorn pished,  but  also  a 
fallhrtB  accouit  of  the  relations  that  e  xisted  Deiween  Ensrlanit  and  France,  end  of  the  singular  stale  of  tiling  that  mark- 
ed the  pe-nod  when  this  wonderful  personage  appeared  upon  the  statre.  The  leading  meideirts  ot  her  life  are  related 
briefly  indeed,  but  with  exquisite  simplicity  and  touching  pathos  ;  and  yon  cannot  repress  vour  admiration  for  tier  heroic 
qualities,  or  scarcely  repress  your  tears  tu  view  of  her  ignominious  cfid.  To  the  i  oulhful  reader  we  heartily  recommeiwf 
this  volume."  —  Alb&ny  Acceriiscr. 

SPRING    AND  SUMMER. 

The  Juvenile  Naturalist ;  or  Walks  in  the  Country.     By  the  Rev.  B.  II.  Draper.     A  beautiful  vol- 
ume, with  nearly  fifty  plates.    1  vol.  square,  handsomely  hound.    $0  75. 

"  Here  we  have  a  charming  volume  for  children  more  advanced— in  which  the  change  of  the  sea- 
sons are  made  to  minister  instruction,  and  the  common  phenomena  of  animal  and  recetablo  life,  of 
atmospheric  pressure,  &c— daily  seen,  and  daily  unheeded— are  agreeably  and  satisfactorily  ex- 
plained ;  wood  cuts  in  abundance  add  their  attractions. "-~N.  Y.  American. 

AUTUMN    AND  WINTER. 

The  Juvenile  Naturalist ;  or  Walks  in  the  Country.    By  the  Rev.  B.  II.  Draper.    A  beautiful  vol 
ume,  with  many  plates,  uniform  with  "  Spring  and  Summer."    $0  7j. 

"This  elegant  volume  is  well  calculated  to  be  of  service  to  children  in  giving  them  come  knowledge 
of  natural  history,  of  field  and  home  occupations  in  autumn  and  winter,  the  manners  and  customs  ot 
different  nations,  the  structure  of  man,  &c.  It  is  by  the  Rev.  R.  II.  Draper,  and  is  written  in  the  fa- 
miliar styie  of  conversation.    Numerous  appropriate  wood  cuts  illustrate  the  text."— Phila.  Chroniclt 


23 


APPLETON'S 

TALES  FOR  THE  PEOPLE 

AND   THEIR  CHILDREN. 


The  greatest  care  has  been  taken  in  selecting  the  works  of  which  the  collection  id 
composed,  so  that  notliing  either  mediocre  in  talent,  or  immoral  in  tendency,  is  ad- 
mitted. Each  volume  is  printed  on  the  finest  paper,  is  illustrated  with  an  elegant 
frontispiece,  and  is  bound  in  a  superior  manner,  tastefully  ornamented. 

The  following  are  comprised  in  the  series,  uniform  in  size  and  style  • — 

THE  POPLAR  GROVE  ;  or,  Little  Harry  and  his  Uncle  Benjamin.  By  Mrs.  Copley.  37}  cts. 

EARLY  FRIENDSHIPS.    By  Mrs.  Copley.    375  cents. 

THE  CROFTON  EOYS.    By' Harriet  Martincau.  37}. 

THE  PEASANT  AND  THE  PElNCE.    By  Harriet  Martineau.    37*  cents. 

NORWAY  AND  THE  NORWEGIANS  ;  or,  Feats  on  the  Fiord.  By  H.  Martineau.  37  Jots, 

MAST E RM AN  READY;  or,  the  Wreck  of  the  Pacific.     Written  for  Young  People  By 

Captain  Marryatt.    Three  volumes  ;  each  37}  cents. 
1HE  LOOKING-GLASS  FOR  THE  MIND;  or,  Intellectual  Mirror.    An  elegant  collection 

of  Delightful  Stories  and  Tales:  many  plates.    50  cents. 
HOPE  ON,  HOPE  EVER;  or  the  Boyhood  of  Felix  Law.    By  Mary  Hewitt.   37}  cents. 
STRIVE  AND  THRIVE  ;  a  Tale.    By  Mary  Howitt.   37}  cents. 

SOWING  AND  REAPING;  or,  What  will  Come  of  It?    By  Mary  Howitt.    37}  cents.  | 

WHO  SHALL  BE  GREATEST  ?  a  Tale.    By  Mary  Howitt.    37  £  cents. 

'WHICH  IS  THE  WISER?  or,  People  Abroad.    By  Mary  Howitt.  37}. 

LITTLE  COIN,  MUCH  CARE  ;  or,  How  Poor  People  Live.    By  Mary  Howitt.    37}  cents. 

WORK  AND  WAGES ;  or,  Life  in  Service.    By  Mary  Howitt.    37}  cents. 

THE  DANGERS  OF  DINING  OUT  ;  or,  Hints  to  those  who  would  maize  Home  Happy, 

To  which  is  added  the  Confessions  of  a  Maniac.    By  Mrs.  Ellis.    37}  cents. 
SOMERVILLE  HALL ;  or  Hints  to  those  who  would  make  Home  Happy.  To  which  is  added 

the  Rising  Tide.    By  Mrs.  Ellis.  37}  cents 
FIRST  IMPRESSIONS;  or,  Hints  to  those  who  Would  make  Home  Happy.  By  Mrs.  Ellis.  37]. 
MINISTER'S  FAMILY ;  or,  Hints  to  those  who  Would  make  Home  Happy.  By  Mrs.  Ellis.  37}. 
THE  TWIN  SISTERS;  a  Tale,    By  Mrs.  Sandham.    37} cents. 
TIRED  OF  HOUSE-KEEPING ;  A  Tale.    By  T.  S.  Arthur.    37}  cents. 
• 

"  Of  late  years  many  writers  have  exerted  their  talents  in  juvenile  literature,  with  great  success. 
Miss  Martineau  has  made  political  economy  as  familiar  to  boys  as  it  formerly  was  to  statesmen.  Our 
own  Miss  Sedgwick  has  produced  some  of  the  most  beautiful  moral  stories,  for  the  edification  and  de- 
light of  children,  which  has  ever  been  written.  The  Hon.  Horace  Mann,  in  addresses  to  adults,  has 
presented  the  claims  of  children  for  good  education,  with  a  power  and  eloquence  of  style,  and  an  eleva- 
tion of  thought,  which  shows  his  heart  is  in  his  work.  The  stories  of  Mary  Howitt,  Harriet  Martin- 
eau,  Mrs.  Copley,  and  Mrs.  Ellis,  which  form  apart  of  'Tales  for  the  People  and  their  Children,'  and 
a  lis;  of  which  we  have  prefixed  to  this  article,  will  be  found  valuable  additions  to  juvenile  literature  ; 
at  the  same  time  they  may  be  read  with  profit  by  parents,  for  the  good  lessons  they  inculcate,  and  by 
ell  ether  readers  for  the  literary  excellence  they  display. 

"  We  wish  they  could  be  placed  in  the  hands,  and  engraven  on  the  minds  of  all  the  youth  in  the 
country.  They  manifest  a  nice  and  accurate  observation  of  human  nature,  and  especially  the  nature 
of  children,  a  fine  sympathy  with  everything  good  and  pure,  and  a  capability  of  infusing  it  in  the  minds 
of  others  —great  beauty  and  simplicity  of  style,  and  a  keen  eye  to  practical  life,  with  all  its  faults,  uni- 
ted with  adeep  love  for  ideal  excellence. 

"  Messrs.  Appleton  &  Co.  deserve  the  highest  praise  for  the  excellent  manner  in  which  they  hava 
*  got  up'  their  juvenile  library,  and  we  sincerely  hope  that  its  success  will  be  so  great  as  to  induce  them 
to  make  continual  contributions  to  its  treasures.  The  collection  is  one  which  should  l>e  owned  by 
every  parent  who  wishei  that  the  moral  and  intellectual  improvement  of  his  children  should  keep  pae« 
■with  their  growth  in  years,  and  the  development  of  their  physical  powers." — Boston  Timet. 


24 


Juvenile  Books,  <§~c. 


PICTORIAL   ROBINSON  CRUSOE. 

The  Life  and  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe.  By  Daniel  De  Foe.  With  a  Memoir  of  the  Author"  j 
and  an  Essay  on  his  writings,  illustrated  with  three  hundred  spirited  Engravings  by  the  celebrated 
French  artist,  <Jrandville,  forming  an  elegant  volume,  octavo,  of  500  pages.    $2  50. 

THE    YOUNG  ISLANDERS. 

A  Tale  of  the  Last  Century.    By  Jefferys  Taylor.    1  vol.  16mo.,  beautifully  illustrated.    75  cents. 
This  fascinating  and  elegantly  illustrated  volume  for  the  young,  is  pronounced  to  be  equal,  fl"  not 
superior  to  De  Foe's  immortal  work  "  Robinson  Crusoe." 

KEIGHTLEY'3    MYTHOLOGY    FOR  SCHOOLS. 

The  Mythology  of  Ancient  Greece  and  Italy,  designed  for  the  use  of  Schools.  By  Thoma* 
Keightley.  Numerous  wood-cut  illustrations.  1  vol.  18mo.  half  bound.  44  cents. 
"This  is  a  neat  little  volume,  and  well  adapted  to  the  purpose  for  which  it  was  prepared.  It  pre-1 
sents  in  a  very  compendious  and  convenient  form,  every  thing  relating  to  the  subject,  of  importance  to' 
the  young  student,  who  may  read  it  with  advantage,  preparatory  to  a  more  detailed  and  extend- 
ed study  of  the  Ancient  Mythology. — L.  I.  Star. 

HAZEN'S    SYMBOLICAL   SPELLING  BOOK. 

The  Symbolical  Spelling-Book,  in  two  parts.    By  Edw.  Hazen.    Containing  288  engravings.  18*  cts 
This  work  is  used  in  upwards  of  1000  different  schools,  and  pronounced  to  be  one  of  the  best  worko 
published. 

A   GIFT    FROM    FAIRY  LAND. 

By  J.  K.  Taulding,  Esq.    Illustrated  with  one  hundred  unirrue  original  plates  by  Chapman  ;  elegantly 
bound.    1  vol.  12mo.    $2  50. 
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Date  Due 


